No, an airport is national territory. And by convention an airplane becomes part of the national territory the moments the doors open (with doors closed different regulations apply (Warsaw Convention, Montreal Convention))
Most International Airports have designated transit area for passengers transiting a country to save them from the hassle of immigration and emigration - Except for the US, where most international airports do not have real transit areas, thus requiring all transiting passengers to enter the US and leave it a few minutes later (wasting 2-3 hours for the whole process, no to mention the humiliating finger-printing and picture taking)
It seems to me, that the US officals think that everyone setting foot on US soil only wants to enter the country (as a potential terrorist).
I work at an airline and we used to have flights to the US with continuing services to other destinations in middle america and the caribbean.
We had to stop this because of the enourmous hassles our transit passengers had to endure on transit (including sometimes refusal of transit). We now go via Havanna, which has its own problems, but at least the passengers have no problems on the transit.
Here in Germany the voting process is 100% transparent.
I wish it was as it used to be, but they are sneaking blackbox voting into german elections as well.
During the last election a few weeks ago 2.100 out of 80.000 polling stations used computers.
Of course they had to use computers without paper trail, computers which an expert team of the irish election commission found to be unfit for use due to the usual issues (secret source code, no code audits etc.)
While small manipulations of the elections would have made no difference in the resulting big coalition, remember that the two parties of the big coalition were only some tenths of a percent from each other, so a few votes in the other direction and Schröder would have remained in Office.
I really doubt that there have been any manipulations (yet), but Germany is not safe from close calls where a smalll manipulation could make all the difference.
Here is an article about two two experts who filed a protest against the results of the last election due to the use of unsafe voting machines.
There aren't many professional-grade Java Desktop apps out there, and those that _are_ out there are generally built for maintainability, not speed (Eclipse, Netbeans).
There might not be many desktop apps out yet, but I have seen at least one very impressive - and fast application that really shows what Java can do these days.
It is an (inhouse) application developed by the DWD (Deutscher Wetterdienst = German Weather Service) to visualize raw weather data. It can project all past and current met-data as well as the output of their forecast models onto any map with color gradients or all other kinds of visual representations meterologist like.
The demonstration was on a normal laptop (with lots of RAM of course) and it took maybe 1-5 seconds to generate a map (e.g. current European temperature gradiants with high level wind vectors or a combined North Atlantic temperature / humidity forecast chart at 10.000ft altitude - all with a few clicks and generated in seconds).
The only thing not real-life about this demonstration was that all databases were stored locally on the laptop as it did not have a network connection.
This shows that Java also has a future for handling large amounts of data at great speed like data mining and visualisation applications.
The international rules are a pilot can't fly for more than 12 hours straight.
First of all, there are no international rules. Flight duty time limitations are national laws and differ quite a bit all over the world.
Speaking for the german laws, which I am very familiar with, it is up to 14h duty time (incl. Check-In and pre-flight preparation). Extendable up to 18h with an enlarged crew (3 iso 2 pilots). But fear not - the airlines are pressuring the EU into accepting even longer duty times for the proposed harmonized european flight duty time regulations.
you can count on having two crews onboard a flight of more than 6-8 hours
With a major airline in good economic shape you can count on a third pilot on flights of more than 10h. A double crew maybe on flights of more than 12h.
For smaller airlines who operate on a shoestring add 1-2 hours.
On the very long flights (like 15 hours [...]) you may find three crews
Please name one airline that does assign three flight crews on a flight. The longest non-stop flight these days is NYC - SIN, taking something between 15-16h and Singapore Airlines has only 4 Pilots on the flight.
What you might be refering to are flights with a fuel stop inbetween. At these stops the crews sometimes change because of operational issues.
brgds
Thomas
This is just one more paranoial waste of money without increasing security. Lets face it - the real security is the bullet-proof reinforced flight deck door with CCTV surveillance of the entry area.
The problem with a secret alert device is a) secrets don't remain secret if you mandate it for the entire industry and b) what is the pilot supposed to do if he gets alerted of "suspicious activity" (We have often "suspicious activities" aka unruly passengers)
The pilot can not go back to check it out. He can not just dive to the next airport because it might have been a false alarm or the situation can be resolved by the flight attendants. If every alarm would lead to an diversion the system could be easily misused for a DoS attack.
So in the end he would just have to wait until 1) someone shows up at the cockpit door and tries to force entry: Hijack (better: attempted hijack) or 2) noone shows up: Situtation resolved.
This is the same as the usless keypads on the flight deck door mandated by the FAA. Two buttons would have been enough: regular entry and emergency entry.
The security is not that only the flight attendants know the secret keycodes - with a knive to their throat they will type in the correct one anyway. The security is the video surveillance to check the area from the flight deck. (To be fair: the keypads have the advantage that passengers in search for a toilet will not accidentaly press the "emergency door bell" - which would mean immediate landing)
Back to a) Why secrets won't work: Like every equipment on board it has to be approved by the FAA which makes it expensive which results in only very few vendors offering a system. And they will offer it to any airline, including Saudia Airways, Pakistani Airways and Ariana Afghan Airways and many other. It would be naive to think that intelligent terrorists do not have contacts in the airlines and can not get access to the devices.
In the end most airlines will anyway use the loophole of some "secret" intercom procedure which they have to document and distribute to thousands of FAs and Pilots.
This is just another stupid TSA regulation in a long line of stupid TSA regulations - like not being allowed to stand in a line in front of a toilet.
Of course the GPS monitor will be used to ensure that they don't get anywhere near a computer:-)
"Sorry Mr. Filetrader - only this cosy little place under the bridge is sufficiently far away from any electronic equipment you might use to commit further copyright crimes!"
But with GPS it will give the authorities unlimited range. With GPS they even would not have to restrict the travel area of an ex-felon.
But the problem is: If he has the bad luck of being near a crime scene at about the time of the crime he would be out of luck. The police now has evidence against him, even if he is innocent.
Thats easier said than proved.
What if someone is wrongly accused of violating a restraining order while sitting alone at home watching DVDs?
It's her strong accusations against his non existing alibi and then his right to private travel is (wrongly) removed with a court order...
Only if they make it a requirement that you must distribute your movie to the academy members with this encryption. What's to stop a small indie studio of just distributing a regular DVD? Especially if the movie has already been released on DVD?
Well, they tried to block the distribution of all screeners last year. Can you be sure that, once the new protection system is established, they won't try again to block all "unprotected" DVDs.
From the article:
"The studios later changed the policy to allow the shipment of encoded videocassettes to Academy Award voters only. A federal judge, however, granted a temporary injunction lifting the screener ban in a lawsuit brought by independent production companies, which argued the policy put them at a disadvantage for awards."
The studios would be expected to pay for a machine to encode its discs and a licensing fee to use Cinea's anti-piracy technology.
"So you are a small indie studio with that incredible good movie (just picked up all prizes in the european festivals).
Sorry, if you can't pay a few megabucks for the license & machines and some more kilobucks for making a few thousand individual watermarked DVDs, then the academy award is not for you.
We hope for your understanding, but we have to protect the interests of our good clients from the MPAA who are in in for business and have no problem of paying these small academy consideration fees. Thank you!
Best Regards,
Mr. Big Boss of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
The best "PC Related" Magazine that I know of is c't.
Very insightful, good know-how articles, writers that know their stuff and even an occasional homebrew hardware project (like a USB / RS232 Interface in the latest issue)
What other PC tabloid these day still has detailed architectural comparisons between the latest AMD and Intel creations. Or will devote pages to the advantages vs. disadvantages of the current RAM technologies.
I would compare c't to Byte Magazine in the mid-80s, before Byte went "mainstream".
The RIAA says, that sales are down some 15% from last year and about 30% from 2000...
You know what... I work in the tourist industry and sales of my company are down about 15% from last year and almost 30% from our best year, which happened to be 2000.
But unlike the RIAA we can't blame filesharing for our poor results. Lets face it: People are just not willing to fork out their money for "luxury" goods like CD's or vacations during a recession.
There is a limit to the money people are willing to spend on CD's, and even if all filesharing stopped tomorrow, CD sales wouldn't rise.
People are rather saving their lower income and will buy only low-price "luxury" goods, like used CD's.
Actually, some smaller vacation companies are still doing good, because they were able to target to low-price segment early and efficent. And that is what the RIAA needs to do to survive: go for the low-price segment.
max 10$/ for a CD
max 0.50 $/ for a single download
and lots of sales at even lower prices.
Changing markets require changing business models.
I like the idea of a pay-for-copyright-extension.
This way even Mrs. Bono can have her "forever minus one day" copyright extension. She just has to pay "infinit minus one dollar" and will have copyright protection until judgment day.
At least with such a scheme the public would have some profits from ever extending copyrights, unlike today, where the public does not profit (by having ideas placed into the public domain) anymore and instead has to pay for the law enforcment to protect IP owners.
Slashdot Mirror
No, an airport is national territory. And by convention an airplane becomes part of the national territory the moments the doors open (with doors closed different regulations apply (Warsaw Convention, Montreal Convention))
Most International Airports have designated transit area for passengers transiting a country to save them from the hassle of immigration and emigration - Except for the US, where most international airports do not have real transit areas, thus requiring all transiting passengers to enter the US and leave it a few minutes later (wasting 2-3 hours for the whole process, no to mention the humiliating finger-printing and picture taking)
It seems to me, that the US officals think that everyone setting foot on US soil only wants to enter the country (as a potential terrorist).
I work at an airline and we used to have flights to the US with continuing services to other destinations in middle america and the caribbean.
We had to stop this because of the enourmous hassles our transit passengers had to endure on transit (including sometimes refusal of transit). We now go via Havanna, which has its own problems, but at least the passengers have no problems on the transit.
During the last election a few weeks ago 2.100 out of 80.000 polling stations used computers.
Of course they had to use computers without paper trail, computers which an expert team of the irish election commission found to be unfit for use due to the usual issues (secret source code, no code audits etc.)
While small manipulations of the elections would have made no difference in the resulting big coalition, remember that the two parties of the big coalition were only some tenths of a percent from each other, so a few votes in the other direction and Schröder would have remained in Office.
I really doubt that there have been any manipulations (yet), but Germany is not safe from close calls where a smalll manipulation could make all the difference.
Here is an article about two two experts who filed a protest against the results of the last election due to the use of unsafe voting machines.There aren't many professional-grade Java Desktop apps out there, and those that _are_ out there are generally built for maintainability, not speed (Eclipse, Netbeans).
There might not be many desktop apps out yet, but I have seen at least one very impressive - and fast application that really shows what Java can do these days.
It is an (inhouse) application developed by the DWD (Deutscher Wetterdienst = German Weather Service) to visualize raw weather data. It can project all past and current met-data as well as the output of their forecast models onto any map with color gradients or all other kinds of visual representations meterologist like.
The demonstration was on a normal laptop (with lots of RAM of course) and it took maybe 1-5 seconds to generate a map (e.g. current European temperature gradiants with high level wind vectors or a combined North Atlantic temperature / humidity forecast chart at 10.000ft altitude - all with a few clicks and generated in seconds).
The only thing not real-life about this demonstration was that all databases were stored locally on the laptop as it did not have a network connection.
This shows that Java also has a future for handling large amounts of data at great speed like data mining and visualisation applications.
Reality check please!
First of all, there are no international rules. Flight duty time limitations are national laws and differ quite a bit all over the world.Speaking for the german laws, which I am very familiar with, it is up to 14h duty time (incl. Check-In and pre-flight preparation). Extendable up to 18h with an enlarged crew (3 iso 2 pilots). But fear not - the airlines are pressuring the EU into accepting even longer duty times for the proposed harmonized european flight duty time regulations. With a major airline in good economic shape you can count on a third pilot on flights of more than 10h. A double crew maybe on flights of more than 12h. For smaller airlines who operate on a shoestring add 1-2 hours. Please name one airline that does assign three flight crews on a flight. The longest non-stop flight these days is NYC - SIN, taking something between 15-16h and Singapore Airlines has only 4 Pilots on the flight.
What you might be refering to are flights with a fuel stop inbetween. At these stops the crews sometimes change because of operational issues. brgds Thomas
This is just one more paranoial waste of money without increasing security. Lets face it - the real security is the bullet-proof reinforced flight deck door with CCTV surveillance of the entry area.
The problem with a secret alert device is a) secrets don't remain secret if you mandate it for the entire industry and b) what is the pilot supposed to do if he gets alerted of "suspicious activity" (We have often "suspicious activities" aka unruly passengers)
The pilot can not go back to check it out. He can not just dive to the next airport because it might have been a false alarm or the situation can be resolved by the flight attendants. If every alarm would lead to an diversion the system could be easily misused for a DoS attack.
So in the end he would just have to wait until 1) someone shows up at the cockpit door and tries to force entry: Hijack (better: attempted hijack) or 2) noone shows up: Situtation resolved.
This is the same as the usless keypads on the flight deck door mandated by the FAA. Two buttons would have been enough: regular entry and emergency entry.
The security is not that only the flight attendants know the secret keycodes - with a knive to their throat they will type in the correct one anyway. The security is the video surveillance to check the area from the flight deck. (To be fair: the keypads have the advantage that passengers in search for a toilet will not accidentaly press the "emergency door bell" - which would mean immediate landing)
Back to a) Why secrets won't work: Like every equipment on board it has to be approved by the FAA which makes it expensive which results in only very few vendors offering a system. And they will offer it to any airline, including Saudia Airways, Pakistani Airways and Ariana Afghan Airways and many other. It would be naive to think that intelligent terrorists do not have contacts in the airlines and can not get access to the devices.
In the end most airlines will anyway use the loophole of some "secret" intercom procedure which they have to document and distribute to thousands of FAs and Pilots.
This is just another stupid TSA regulation in a long line of stupid TSA regulations - like not being allowed to stand in a line in front of a toilet.
p13n - doesn't sound as bad, now does it?
"Sorry Mr. Filetrader - only this cosy little place under the bridge is sufficiently far away from any electronic equipment you might use to commit further copyright crimes!"
But with GPS it will give the authorities unlimited range. With GPS they even would not have to restrict the travel area of an ex-felon.
But the problem is: If he has the bad luck of being near a crime scene at about the time of the crime he would be out of luck. The police now has evidence against him, even if he is innocent.
Thats easier said than proved.
What if someone is wrongly accused of violating a restraining order while sitting alone at home watching DVDs?
It's her strong accusations against his non existing alibi and then his right to private travel is (wrongly) removed with a court order...
Does anyone know what instrument Torvalds even plays?!
Keyboard of course
It redirected me to search.msn.de which is fine with me as I do live in Germany. But instead of good old fashioned adult sites I got:
yeah - thats what I am looking for
[Sound of me leaving MSN Search site in highspeed]
Okay, so I haven't missed anything by ignoring MSN.
BTW here is the original (untranslated) response:
Bei der Suche nach sex werden möglicherweise sexuelle Inhalte ausgegeben.
Ändern Sie Ihre Suchbegriffe, um Ergebnisse zu erhalten
Well, they tried to block the distribution of all screeners last year. Can you be sure that, once the new protection system is established, they won't try again to block all "unprotected" DVDs.
From the article:
"The studios later changed the policy to allow the shipment of encoded videocassettes to Academy Award voters only. A federal judge, however, granted a temporary injunction lifting the screener ban in a lawsuit brought by independent production companies, which argued the policy put them at a disadvantage for awards."
The studios would be expected to pay for a machine to encode its discs and a licensing fee to use Cinea's anti-piracy technology.
"So you are a small indie studio with that incredible good movie (just picked up all prizes in the european festivals).
Sorry, if you can't pay a few megabucks for the license & machines and some more kilobucks for making a few thousand individual watermarked DVDs, then the academy award is not for you.
We hope for your understanding, but we have to protect the interests of our good clients from the MPAA who are in in for business and have no problem of paying these small academy consideration fees. Thank you!
Best Regards,
Mr. Big Boss of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
The best "PC Related" Magazine that I know of is c't.
Very insightful, good know-how articles, writers that know their stuff and even an occasional homebrew hardware project (like a USB / RS232 Interface in the latest issue)
What other PC tabloid these day still has detailed architectural comparisons between the latest AMD and Intel creations. Or will devote pages to the advantages vs. disadvantages of the current RAM technologies.
I would compare c't to Byte Magazine in the mid-80s, before Byte went "mainstream".
Thomas
You know what... I work in the tourist industry and sales of my company are down about 15% from last year and almost 30% from our best year, which happened to be 2000.
But unlike the RIAA we can't blame filesharing for our poor results. Lets face it: People are just not willing to fork out their money for "luxury" goods like CD's or vacations during a recession.
There is a limit to the money people are willing to spend on CD's, and even if all filesharing stopped tomorrow, CD sales wouldn't rise. People are rather saving their lower income and will buy only low-price "luxury" goods, like used CD's.
Actually, some smaller vacation companies are still doing good, because they were able to target to low-price segment early and efficent. And that is what the RIAA needs to do to survive: go for the low-price segment.
max 10$/ for a CD
max 0.50 $/ for a single download
and lots of sales at even lower prices.
Changing markets require changing business models.
I like the idea of a pay-for-copyright-extension. This way even Mrs. Bono can have her "forever minus one day" copyright extension. She just has to pay "infinit minus one dollar" and will have copyright protection until judgment day. At least with such a scheme the public would have some profits from ever extending copyrights, unlike today, where the public does not profit (by having ideas placed into the public domain) anymore and instead has to pay for the law enforcment to protect IP owners.