You complain that "airplane mode" is an incorrect term, and then you don't care that you've suggested a replacement that is just as incorrect. You don't care, but you post to/. about it anyway. What a marvelous world you live in.
Although they are clearly electronic devices, rarely does a flight attendant ask a passenger to turn one of these units off.
It really depends on the flight attendant. I've had them demand that I turn mine off (Delta was very strict, as I recall), and others have said nothing at all. I've pretty much solved the problem by putting a piece of black tape over the LED that announces "HEY! I'm ON!". It's an obvious piece of tape, but as long as they don't see the LED they leave me alone.
If this ruling is applied by the CAA in the UK, I will gain about 50 hours a year of time I can spend reading. That is a massive win.
If you went to bed just ten minutes later each evening, you'd gain more than 60 hours of reading time each year. If you read paper books instead of abandoning that simple technology, you'd still have your 50 hours.
You're incorrect for counting the 10 minutes "to the terminal" after landing. You can turn on your cell phone as soon as you land, at least in the US, and I seem to remember that announcement on non-US flights I've been on. (But that's not an Ebook like I'm restricting myself to using!) You can read ebooks on most smart phones. If that 50 hours is so critical, you'll already be doing it for times when you've forgotten your big ebook reader.
And if that 50 hours is critical, just imagine how many hours extra you'd be able to read if you just stopped posting to./!
Sorry, I'm used to VHF/UHF voice operation on 2-meter - a.004 difference isn't all that bad and would still be entirely functional
That's odd. When someone tries to use my 2m repeater and they're that far off frequency, they are always distorted and usually unintelligible. When you're using a 4kHz deviation system, that means your entire signal is on one side of the passband at the receiver, and unless the receiver is really really sloppy, you're outside the passband for a large part of that signal. You're 27ppm off frequency at 144MHz. That's huge. 5ppm is considered large these days, and 2ppm is standard practice (at least for LMR).
And don't go to Europe, they're starting to use narrowband, and 4kHz at 144MHz would be outrageous.
On a radio with 5kHz steps, being 4kHz off means you're closer to next frequency up or down than you are to the one you are trying to work, and you probably ought to deliberately detune your radio to be closer to on-frequency. That's kinda exactly what someone who is dealing with a doppler shift has to do.
(a) The installation and operation of an amateur station on a ship or aircraft must be approved by the master of the ship or pilot in command of the aircraft.
Installation AND operation. Maybe clipping onto the chassis is "installation", but holding the radio in my hand next to the window isn't. Were it "installation or operation", you'd be right.
So, as long as you get permission from the pilot in command, go for it. Just like before.
No, actually, not like before. The pilot in command doesn't have the authority to approve use of amateur radios on board "an aircraft operated by a holder of an air carrier operating certificate or an operating certificate". That's 91.21(c) of the federal aviation regulations, which just happens to be the rule that needs to be amended for the airlines to allow PED use in the first place.
Like the airlines, they would prefer that in the case of an emergency you don't have to sit there and think for too long about what you're supposed to do.
It's not the airlines, it is the FAA. Preflight briefings are mandatory. Here is the rule. It is in a section that deals with larger aircraft, so the private pilot who is taking his friends up for a sightseeing tour isn't REQUIRED to follow that reg, but he's a fool if he doesn't do a briefing that includes how to open the door, keep your seatbelt on at all times, don't touch anything, and "that noise you are going to hear when we land (bzzzzzz - stall warning horn) is normal, so don't freak out." If you start to feel sick, TELL ME. And don't touch anything.
6. Properly stow heavier devices under seats or in the overhead bins during takeoff and landing. These items could impede evacuation of an aircraft or may injure you or someone else in the event of turbulence or an accident. My bad, I confused "stow" with "turn off." Because having it turned on does so much good if it's stowed.
"Heavier devices". The MP3 player "stowed" in my pocket does me a considerable amount of good. The noise cancelling headphones do me an even greater amount of good when stowed on my head in the 'on' position.
This is no change. There was never a prohibition against using wi-fi or bluetooth.
You are wrong.
I've flown several airline which offer w-fi during flights in the past decade, usually with a hefty fee.
This is a very specific exception to the rule against radio transmitters on board an aircraft. Except for the relatively recent addition of on-board wi-fi services, wi-fi and bluetooth have been prohibited while in flight.
You can also continue to use short-range Bluetooth accessories, like wireless keyboards.
The airline you fly has been letting you bend the rules. The ones I fly are quite explicit in saying "you may NOT use short range".
I read it, dingleberry.
Being insulting doesn't make you right, it only shows that you are overly sensitive when you get caught misreading something simple.
The only real difference is not having to turn things off during the 10-15 minutes of takeoff and landing.
Plus being able to use wifi and bluetooth in general, and many other kinds of radio receivers. This change would legalize all the people who sneak GPS receivers on board to follow their flight. It would even legalize the use of scanners to listen to ATC. And many people would consider a change that removes the requirement to turn off noise cancelling headsets to be a major change to the rules since it was such a patently absurd side-effect of a relatively simple rule. It was, in fact, a detriment to safety, since people who were wearing noise cancellers plugged into the aircraft audio system were about the only ones who could hear any of the announcement made during takeoff -- like "assume crash positions".
4 kHz is wider than the standard SSB radio signal, and a significant fraction of the modern 11k0f3e (11kHz wide FM analog) channels being used commercially. It is negligible for the standard AM radios in aviation use, and for any wideband Wifi system.
I'm pretty sure radios capable of transmission are still a no-no.
It does help if you read the actual article before you say something like that. The FAA is rather specific about not using cell phones, and just as explicit that other transmitters (like wifi and bluetooth) are perfectly acceptable. And the only reason they are explicit about cell phones is not because of the transmitter technology, but the FCC frequency allocations for some of the frequencies involved are land mobile only, not air mobile.
The US military has come up with a system called GIIEP (pronounced "jeep") that allows airborne cellular data transfer in real time, using commercial cellular data system. They've managed to get a commercial cell modem manufacturer to disable the two (IIRC) bands that are land mobile only so only the frequencies that are legal for airborne use are available. Those "cell phones" would be usable from the air, except that it is too hard for anyone to know which ones are and are not legal there so it is easier to say "no" than "ok if...". Most people wouldn't know.
And I'm confused about some of your other comments... AFAIK there are many products (expensive, mind you) that can listen in on cellular frequencies,
Yes, there are. That's why I said "certain kinds of radios". Those the public would be most likely to buy are the main target. Scanners, for example. Some "communications receivers" can receive cell frequencies, but the dealer may limit purchase to authorized government agencies (this one, for example.) The key words to look for are "cellular blocked".
The FCC could not simply ban every radio capable of receiving cell signals. That would have made it illegal for HP to sell the CDMA service monitor I now own. Or almost any service monitor for that matter. That would have made some TVs illegal for sale, since they reused some of the upper UHF TV spectrum for cell. They went after the low hanging fruit, to prove to the people who were ignorant of how radio works that the FCC cares about their privacy and did something.
It is long past the time to remove that idiotic regulation. The cell carriers have solved the problem of casual interception, and they cannot solve the problem of deliberate eavesdroppers.
Who believes that all rules are silly? It's only the rules people don't like that are silly.
No, it's rules that they don't understand that they think are silly. And evidence shows that many people who use cell phones believe there is some magic involved that carries their voice to the intended recipient. That's why back in the 90's a vocal group of idiots managed to get laws enacted to insure their privacy while using analog CDMA cell phones. After all, it was a CELL PHONE and they had every reason to expect privacy in their conversation, even though they were using RADIO to send their VOICE over the public's airwaves. Thus it became illegal, and remains illegal to this day, for the sale or import of certain kinds of radios that can receive frequencies allocated to cellular telephone services.
Anyway, "airplane mode" is still useful. Probably should be called "non-emission mode" or something though.
The only non-emission mode for a cellphone is "battery removed". Otherwise, the CPU is still running and still using square-wave clock signals and still emitting something. Even if it just wakes up once a second to check the "on/off" button to see if it should turn all the way back on.
"Airplane mode" is "radios off", because (most) radios have deliberate oscillators in their receive section that can easily leak and act like transmitters, and cell/wifi/bt are all deliberate transmitters to start with.
Yes, the unintentional emissions are supposed to be very low, but stuff breaks and signals leak.
How exactly does this differ from the policies from now? Airplane-mode only, check. Turned off during take-off and landing, check.
Uncheck. On for take-off and landings, except for special cases when visibility is low and the low visibility navigation systems are not PED certified.
Wi-fi allowed (if you want to pay the airline $20 for a couple hours' access), check.
Uncheck. Wi-fi and bluetooth allowed, with no requirement to pay the airline. I figure it will be interesting to run an open NAP and see how much data can be sniffed from devices trying to get a wi-fi connection. Or to spoof a lot of large online services to get login credentials. Fun.
Where's the big change?
/. commenter who hasn't bothered to read TFA, check. No change.
but you still won't have to put up with the passenger next to you carrying on a loud phone conversation
Yeah, but now us old hams can chat up the "local" repeater and talk about our surgeries and medications and how the weather is at 30,000 feet. I'll clip onto the plane's frame for an antenna and fire up my QRP rig and have a CW conversation. It's gonna be fun.
knowledge which programmers are apparently not supposed to have.
Knowledge which programmers of portable code do not have. Yes, if you are writing code only for the Spitfire X2300 CPU you can assume things about how numbers are handled. If you want your code to run on other things, where "other things" means "other people's computers", you need to write portable code. Things like "I know how long an 'int' is" fall into the "a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing." And yes, I've fallen into that trap and had to spend a significant bit of time fixing my 32 bit code to run under a 64 bit OS. And a bit of time fixing other people's programs, when they use their knowledge of binary numbers to cut corners.
I now have to go check all my source code...
I'd like to, and I followed the instructions for compiling it, but it fails at the "autoreconf" step, complaining about an undefined macro "AC_PROG_MKDIR_P". And clang and llvm fail to configure because the "optional" python causes a fatal error when it isn't there.
Since I joined the company, we have already doubled in size, hiring plenty more Americans.... On the other hand, I and other people like me are actively helping the US economy by creating new jobs.
Do you honestly think there was nobody in the US who could have done your job? And that the growth of the company you work for is mainly because of your work product?
Arguing that H1Bs really help the US economy requires the answer to both to be "yes". Otherwise, you are simply taking a job that some US resident could have filled and claiming that you're helping him out by having it.
Bullshit. "The case did not involve the federal ban on direct contributions from corporations or unions to candidate campaigns or political parties, which remain illegal in races for federal office." CU wasn't trying to donate to a campaign, it was trying to buy airtime for a movie. That, sir, is a direct use of the first amendment rights granted to the people who made up the corporation. Read about it before you spout such utter nonsense again.
Look how Sarah Palin traveled with her family on millions of dollars of "campaign donations" and didn't even run for an office!
You mean the Sarah Palin who was the VP on the McCain/Palin presidential campaign? That's not running for an office?
Your reality is so far from real that it isn't worth continuing.
There were 8 districts in the town, so there were basically 1000 candidates. In a town of 400000 people, I might add.
So, if each one was given just $1000 to run his campaign (a pittance in today's elections, and certainly so when there are 100 people all competing for the same spot), that would be $1 mil. $2.50 per person, extracted from their pockets, so that 999 people that they don't want to vote for could have "free as in beer" speech.
And there are those who say this wouldn't be a problem.
Personally I would prefer a basic competency test for voting that has some simple questions like:
What are the 3 branches of government?
Sadly for this idea, you will find a fierce firestorm of opposition to any literacy test based on Civil Rights Acts of various years. If it is racist to try to make someone prove they have the right to vote before allowing them to vote, then any literacy test you come up with will be racist, too.
It's ironic but the Senate has become the house of Congress which best represents the popular vote as the House was intended.
The house was never intended to represent "the popular vote", it was intended to represent the votes of the people who elected each representative. The only vote for a representative that matters are the votes of the people in his district. This idea that there is some "national popular vote" is nonsense.
If the State legislatures selected the Senate, the Senate would represent the gerrymandering of the State legislatures, nothing more.
And yet, that was the intent for the Senate. The Senate represents THE STATE interests, not the individuals therein. That's why there are two per state. Each state in the Senate has an equal voice.
Until partisan gerrymandering is fixed, a popularly elected Senate is the best we've got.
Wahhh! People from other states elected people I don't like! We need to change the system so they'll only elect people I want them to..."
The US Constitution was not designed to withstand the corruption of strong political parties.
And yet is has done so for a very long time. Oh, sorry, I forgot you defintion. When someone you don't like gets elected, that corruption.
May I point out that despite the Republicans controlling the House, not a single one of them was involved in gerrymand... I mean redrawing district boundaries, in Oregon. That was done by the Democratically controlled state House, split Senate, and Democratic Governor. The US representatives don't draw the lines, the states do.
The latter became a problem following the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling, which grated some of the rights of natural persons to corporations and makes it easier for them to lend financial support to political campaigns.
Citizens United was a CORPORATION FORMED FOR THE EXPLICIT PURPOSE OF SPENDING MONEY ON A CAMPAIGN. All of those people who formed that corporation did so voluntarily and with the purpose of spending THEIR MONEY to pay for FREE SPEECH. It's nothing like when Warren Buffet or Bill Gates uses their corporate money to buy the media. Everyone involved in CU was there for a reason.
It is NOT A PROBLEM when free citizens band together to spend THEIR MONEY paying for political speech. It is only a problem when people who have already banded together to bolster their own free speech rights try to strip those rights from others who have done the same thing, by trying to claim there was some new right created by CU vs. FEC. There wasn't. It's people using their existing rights. You may not like what they have to say, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't have the right to say it. That's the very purpose of the first amendment, to protect people like that from people like you. To protect all groups from people like Move To Amend, who are hypocrites for doing exactly the same thing they are trying to prevent people they don't like from doing.
At the State level, more than half of all political campaigns are already publicly financed in some way, so there's nothing strange about doing the same for political campaigns for federal office.
Show me in the Constitution where one of the powers our government was granted by the people was to take money from everyone to hand out to politicians so they can campaign with it. Especially when it is very likely that more than half of the people the money is being taken from oppose the things more than half of those politicians will be saying. "Free speech" isn't free as in "doesn't cost anything", and forcing people to pay for other people's free speech is insulting and unconstitutional.
How is that even possible? People were extraordinarily shallow in the past; I can't imagine how much more shallow people can get.
This book is a study of a self-selected set. Who is surprised when there is a study of the people who are likely to be so narcissistic that they think everyone in the world wants to hear them tweet about their bodily functions and what they had for lunch, who thinks everyone needs to see selfie-instagrams of them doing inane things, and the study finds that those people are shallow narcissistic sheep?
Kids these days. This is definitely a new phenomenon.
Probably not new, but certainly more openly displayed and by seeing more people doing it, more socially acceptable.
(What happens if there's construction and some spaces are lost?)
Absolutely nothing. Except those parking spaces are gone. That's why it is so especially stupid to construct these boxes in regular parking spaces.
This Friday is a home football game. The largest lot on campus is, can you guess, right next to the stadium. To keep from inconveniencing the athletic boosters, all the lots around the stadium are closed to staff and students starting at 7AM. On Friday. A workday. The next layer of lots (further away but still not all of the lots on campus) are closed to staff and students at 1PM. Be out or be towed. The rest of campus is closed at 5PM. Your workday ends at five. Period.
The athletic department is telling people to telecommute that day. They run campus.
The disabled drivers probably already get special spaces.
It's called "ADA". Look it up. Special disabled drivers get special permits and permanent "them only" parking spaces. That's so they don't have to compete with any of the other ADA users for the, in one particular case, four almost always empty ADA spaces they used 8 regular spaces to create.
Those with a decent reason can be given permits,
Here's that arrogance again. "Decent reason"? You mean like "I work here"? Now you think people need a reason you approve of to be able to park at work?
those wanting the convenience could pay to reduce demand.
This is a staff permit lot and the people who used to park there get the privilege of paying more than $250/year for their parking permits. They never tow anyone parked illegally, they just give them a ticket. The worst they've ever done is boot one car, which of course meant that the person illegally parked there couldn't leave and open the space up for a legal user.
When someone drives to work, you can only reduce demand for parking by upping the fees so much. And when the demand increases because you are steadily and deliberately reducing supply, the system is wrong. This is our "Parking and Transit Services", which is a parking service in name only. They've publicly said their goal is to remove cars from campus. They've pushed so many staff and students off campus to find parking that they city is implementing half a dozen more "residential zones" around campus where you can park for a total of two hours unless you have a resident permit. There are already three such zones.
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You complain that "airplane mode" is an incorrect term, and then you don't care that you've suggested a replacement that is just as incorrect. You don't care, but you post to /. about it anyway. What a marvelous world you live in.
Although they are clearly electronic devices, rarely does a flight attendant ask a passenger to turn one of these units off.
It really depends on the flight attendant. I've had them demand that I turn mine off (Delta was very strict, as I recall), and others have said nothing at all. I've pretty much solved the problem by putting a piece of black tape over the LED that announces "HEY! I'm ON!". It's an obvious piece of tape, but as long as they don't see the LED they leave me alone.
If this ruling is applied by the CAA in the UK, I will gain about 50 hours a year of time I can spend reading. That is a massive win.
If you went to bed just ten minutes later each evening, you'd gain more than 60 hours of reading time each year. If you read paper books instead of abandoning that simple technology, you'd still have your 50 hours.
You're incorrect for counting the 10 minutes "to the terminal" after landing. You can turn on your cell phone as soon as you land, at least in the US, and I seem to remember that announcement on non-US flights I've been on. (But that's not an Ebook like I'm restricting myself to using!) You can read ebooks on most smart phones. If that 50 hours is so critical, you'll already be doing it for times when you've forgotten your big ebook reader.
And if that 50 hours is critical, just imagine how many hours extra you'd be able to read if you just stopped posting to ./!
Sorry, I'm used to VHF/UHF voice operation on 2-meter - a .004 difference isn't all that bad and would still be entirely functional
That's odd. When someone tries to use my 2m repeater and they're that far off frequency, they are always distorted and usually unintelligible. When you're using a 4kHz deviation system, that means your entire signal is on one side of the passband at the receiver, and unless the receiver is really really sloppy, you're outside the passband for a large part of that signal. You're 27ppm off frequency at 144MHz. That's huge. 5ppm is considered large these days, and 2ppm is standard practice (at least for LMR).
And don't go to Europe, they're starting to use narrowband, and 4kHz at 144MHz would be outrageous.
On a radio with 5kHz steps, being 4kHz off means you're closer to next frequency up or down than you are to the one you are trying to work, and you probably ought to deliberately detune your radio to be closer to on-frequency. That's kinda exactly what someone who is dealing with a doppler shift has to do.
(a) The installation and operation of an amateur station on a ship or aircraft must be approved by the master of the ship or pilot in command of the aircraft.
Installation AND operation. Maybe clipping onto the chassis is "installation", but holding the radio in my hand next to the window isn't. Were it "installation or operation", you'd be right.
So, as long as you get permission from the pilot in command, go for it. Just like before.
No, actually, not like before. The pilot in command doesn't have the authority to approve use of amateur radios on board "an aircraft operated by a holder of an air carrier operating certificate or an operating certificate". That's 91.21(c) of the federal aviation regulations, which just happens to be the rule that needs to be amended for the airlines to allow PED use in the first place.
Like the airlines, they would prefer that in the case of an emergency you don't have to sit there and think for too long about what you're supposed to do.
It's not the airlines, it is the FAA. Preflight briefings are mandatory. Here is the rule. It is in a section that deals with larger aircraft, so the private pilot who is taking his friends up for a sightseeing tour isn't REQUIRED to follow that reg, but he's a fool if he doesn't do a briefing that includes how to open the door, keep your seatbelt on at all times, don't touch anything, and "that noise you are going to hear when we land (bzzzzzz - stall warning horn) is normal, so don't freak out." If you start to feel sick, TELL ME. And don't touch anything.
6. Properly stow heavier devices under seats or in the overhead bins during takeoff and landing. These items could impede evacuation of an aircraft or may injure you or someone else in the event of turbulence or an accident. My bad, I confused "stow" with "turn off." Because having it turned on does so much good if it's stowed.
"Heavier devices". The MP3 player "stowed" in my pocket does me a considerable amount of good. The noise cancelling headphones do me an even greater amount of good when stowed on my head in the 'on' position.
This is no change. There was never a prohibition against using wi-fi or bluetooth.
You are wrong.
I've flown several airline which offer w-fi during flights in the past decade, usually with a hefty fee.
This is a very specific exception to the rule against radio transmitters on board an aircraft. Except for the relatively recent addition of on-board wi-fi services, wi-fi and bluetooth have been prohibited while in flight.
You can also continue to use short-range Bluetooth accessories, like wireless keyboards.
The airline you fly has been letting you bend the rules. The ones I fly are quite explicit in saying "you may NOT use short range".
I read it, dingleberry.
Being insulting doesn't make you right, it only shows that you are overly sensitive when you get caught misreading something simple.
The only real difference is not having to turn things off during the 10-15 minutes of takeoff and landing.
Plus being able to use wifi and bluetooth in general, and many other kinds of radio receivers. This change would legalize all the people who sneak GPS receivers on board to follow their flight. It would even legalize the use of scanners to listen to ATC. And many people would consider a change that removes the requirement to turn off noise cancelling headsets to be a major change to the rules since it was such a patently absurd side-effect of a relatively simple rule. It was, in fact, a detriment to safety, since people who were wearing noise cancellers plugged into the aircraft audio system were about the only ones who could hear any of the announcement made during takeoff -- like "assume crash positions".
4 kHz is wider than the standard SSB radio signal, and a significant fraction of the modern 11k0f3e (11kHz wide FM analog) channels being used commercially. It is negligible for the standard AM radios in aviation use, and for any wideband Wifi system.
I'm pretty sure radios capable of transmission are still a no-no.
It does help if you read the actual article before you say something like that. The FAA is rather specific about not using cell phones, and just as explicit that other transmitters (like wifi and bluetooth) are perfectly acceptable. And the only reason they are explicit about cell phones is not because of the transmitter technology, but the FCC frequency allocations for some of the frequencies involved are land mobile only, not air mobile.
The US military has come up with a system called GIIEP (pronounced "jeep") that allows airborne cellular data transfer in real time, using commercial cellular data system. They've managed to get a commercial cell modem manufacturer to disable the two (IIRC) bands that are land mobile only so only the frequencies that are legal for airborne use are available. Those "cell phones" would be usable from the air, except that it is too hard for anyone to know which ones are and are not legal there so it is easier to say "no" than "ok if...". Most people wouldn't know.
CDMA is not analog.
Ok. My bad.
And I'm confused about some of your other comments... AFAIK there are many products (expensive, mind you) that can listen in on cellular frequencies,
Yes, there are. That's why I said "certain kinds of radios". Those the public would be most likely to buy are the main target. Scanners, for example. Some "communications receivers" can receive cell frequencies, but the dealer may limit purchase to authorized government agencies (this one, for example.) The key words to look for are "cellular blocked".
The FCC could not simply ban every radio capable of receiving cell signals. That would have made it illegal for HP to sell the CDMA service monitor I now own. Or almost any service monitor for that matter. That would have made some TVs illegal for sale, since they reused some of the upper UHF TV spectrum for cell. They went after the low hanging fruit, to prove to the people who were ignorant of how radio works that the FCC cares about their privacy and did something.
It is long past the time to remove that idiotic regulation. The cell carriers have solved the problem of casual interception, and they cannot solve the problem of deliberate eavesdroppers.
Who believes that all rules are silly? It's only the rules people don't like that are silly.
No, it's rules that they don't understand that they think are silly. And evidence shows that many people who use cell phones believe there is some magic involved that carries their voice to the intended recipient. That's why back in the 90's a vocal group of idiots managed to get laws enacted to insure their privacy while using analog CDMA cell phones. After all, it was a CELL PHONE and they had every reason to expect privacy in their conversation, even though they were using RADIO to send their VOICE over the public's airwaves. Thus it became illegal, and remains illegal to this day, for the sale or import of certain kinds of radios that can receive frequencies allocated to cellular telephone services.
Anyway, "airplane mode" is still useful. Probably should be called "non-emission mode" or something though.
The only non-emission mode for a cellphone is "battery removed". Otherwise, the CPU is still running and still using square-wave clock signals and still emitting something. Even if it just wakes up once a second to check the "on/off" button to see if it should turn all the way back on.
"Airplane mode" is "radios off", because (most) radios have deliberate oscillators in their receive section that can easily leak and act like transmitters, and cell/wifi/bt are all deliberate transmitters to start with.
Yes, the unintentional emissions are supposed to be very low, but stuff breaks and signals leak.
How exactly does this differ from the policies from now? Airplane-mode only, check. Turned off during take-off and landing, check.
Uncheck. On for take-off and landings, except for special cases when visibility is low and the low visibility navigation systems are not PED certified.
Wi-fi allowed (if you want to pay the airline $20 for a couple hours' access), check.
Uncheck. Wi-fi and bluetooth allowed, with no requirement to pay the airline. I figure it will be interesting to run an open NAP and see how much data can be sniffed from devices trying to get a wi-fi connection. Or to spoof a lot of large online services to get login credentials. Fun.
Where's the big change?
but you still won't have to put up with the passenger next to you carrying on a loud phone conversation
Yeah, but now us old hams can chat up the "local" repeater and talk about our surgeries and medications and how the weather is at 30,000 feet. I'll clip onto the plane's frame for an antenna and fire up my QRP rig and have a CW conversation. It's gonna be fun.
Unless some dinky laboratory mice with modified DNA beat me to it. Poit!
Mine just says "Formosa." Isn't that a cheese?
No, it's a drink made by mixing champagne and orange juice.
knowledge which programmers are apparently not supposed to have.
Knowledge which programmers of portable code do not have. Yes, if you are writing code only for the Spitfire X2300 CPU you can assume things about how numbers are handled. If you want your code to run on other things, where "other things" means "other people's computers", you need to write portable code. Things like "I know how long an 'int' is" fall into the "a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing." And yes, I've fallen into that trap and had to spend a significant bit of time fixing my 32 bit code to run under a 64 bit OS. And a bit of time fixing other people's programs, when they use their knowledge of binary numbers to cut corners.
I now have to go check all my source code ...
I'd like to, and I followed the instructions for compiling it, but it fails at the "autoreconf" step, complaining about an undefined macro "AC_PROG_MKDIR_P". And clang and llvm fail to configure because the "optional" python causes a fatal error when it isn't there.
Since I joined the company, we have already doubled in size, hiring plenty more Americans. ... On the other hand, I and other people like me are actively helping the US economy by creating new jobs.
Do you honestly think there was nobody in the US who could have done your job? And that the growth of the company you work for is mainly because of your work product?
Arguing that H1Bs really help the US economy requires the answer to both to be "yes". Otherwise, you are simply taking a job that some US resident could have filled and claiming that you're helping him out by having it.
and made bribery perfectly legal.
Bullshit. Bribery is still illegal.
CU gave a simple way to dismiss donation limits
Bullshit. "The case did not involve the federal ban on direct contributions from corporations or unions to candidate campaigns or political parties, which remain illegal in races for federal office." CU wasn't trying to donate to a campaign, it was trying to buy airtime for a movie. That, sir, is a direct use of the first amendment rights granted to the people who made up the corporation. Read about it before you spout such utter nonsense again.
Look how Sarah Palin traveled with her family on millions of dollars of "campaign donations" and didn't even run for an office!
You mean the Sarah Palin who was the VP on the McCain/Palin presidential campaign? That's not running for an office?
Your reality is so far from real that it isn't worth continuing.
There were 8 districts in the town, so there were basically 1000 candidates. In a town of 400000 people, I might add.
So, if each one was given just $1000 to run his campaign (a pittance in today's elections, and certainly so when there are 100 people all competing for the same spot), that would be $1 mil. $2.50 per person, extracted from their pockets, so that 999 people that they don't want to vote for could have "free as in beer" speech.
And there are those who say this wouldn't be a problem.
Personally I would prefer a basic competency test for voting that has some simple questions like: What are the 3 branches of government?
Sadly for this idea, you will find a fierce firestorm of opposition to any literacy test based on Civil Rights Acts of various years. If it is racist to try to make someone prove they have the right to vote before allowing them to vote, then any literacy test you come up with will be racist, too.
It's ironic but the Senate has become the house of Congress which best represents the popular vote as the House was intended.
The house was never intended to represent "the popular vote", it was intended to represent the votes of the people who elected each representative. The only vote for a representative that matters are the votes of the people in his district. This idea that there is some "national popular vote" is nonsense.
If the State legislatures selected the Senate, the Senate would represent the gerrymandering of the State legislatures, nothing more.
And yet, that was the intent for the Senate. The Senate represents THE STATE interests, not the individuals therein. That's why there are two per state. Each state in the Senate has an equal voice.
Until partisan gerrymandering is fixed, a popularly elected Senate is the best we've got.
Wahhh! People from other states elected people I don't like! We need to change the system so they'll only elect people I want them to..."
The US Constitution was not designed to withstand the corruption of strong political parties.
And yet is has done so for a very long time. Oh, sorry, I forgot you defintion. When someone you don't like gets elected, that corruption.
May I point out that despite the Republicans controlling the House, not a single one of them was involved in gerrymand... I mean redrawing district boundaries, in Oregon. That was done by the Democratically controlled state House, split Senate, and Democratic Governor. The US representatives don't draw the lines, the states do.
The latter became a problem following the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling, which grated some of the rights of natural persons to corporations and makes it easier for them to lend financial support to political campaigns.
Citizens United was a CORPORATION FORMED FOR THE EXPLICIT PURPOSE OF SPENDING MONEY ON A CAMPAIGN. All of those people who formed that corporation did so voluntarily and with the purpose of spending THEIR MONEY to pay for FREE SPEECH. It's nothing like when Warren Buffet or Bill Gates uses their corporate money to buy the media. Everyone involved in CU was there for a reason.
It is NOT A PROBLEM when free citizens band together to spend THEIR MONEY paying for political speech. It is only a problem when people who have already banded together to bolster their own free speech rights try to strip those rights from others who have done the same thing, by trying to claim there was some new right created by CU vs. FEC. There wasn't. It's people using their existing rights. You may not like what they have to say, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't have the right to say it. That's the very purpose of the first amendment, to protect people like that from people like you. To protect all groups from people like Move To Amend, who are hypocrites for doing exactly the same thing they are trying to prevent people they don't like from doing.
At the State level, more than half of all political campaigns are already publicly financed in some way, so there's nothing strange about doing the same for political campaigns for federal office.
Show me in the Constitution where one of the powers our government was granted by the people was to take money from everyone to hand out to politicians so they can campaign with it. Especially when it is very likely that more than half of the people the money is being taken from oppose the things more than half of those politicians will be saying. "Free speech" isn't free as in "doesn't cost anything", and forcing people to pay for other people's free speech is insulting and unconstitutional.
How is that even possible? People were extraordinarily shallow in the past; I can't imagine how much more shallow people can get.
This book is a study of a self-selected set. Who is surprised when there is a study of the people who are likely to be so narcissistic that they think everyone in the world wants to hear them tweet about their bodily functions and what they had for lunch, who thinks everyone needs to see selfie-instagrams of them doing inane things, and the study finds that those people are shallow narcissistic sheep?
Kids these days. This is definitely a new phenomenon.
Probably not new, but certainly more openly displayed and by seeing more people doing it, more socially acceptable.
(What happens if there's construction and some spaces are lost?)
Absolutely nothing. Except those parking spaces are gone. That's why it is so especially stupid to construct these boxes in regular parking spaces.
This Friday is a home football game. The largest lot on campus is, can you guess, right next to the stadium. To keep from inconveniencing the athletic boosters, all the lots around the stadium are closed to staff and students starting at 7AM. On Friday. A workday. The next layer of lots (further away but still not all of the lots on campus) are closed to staff and students at 1PM. Be out or be towed. The rest of campus is closed at 5PM. Your workday ends at five. Period.
The athletic department is telling people to telecommute that day. They run campus.
The disabled drivers probably already get special spaces.
It's called "ADA". Look it up. Special disabled drivers get special permits and permanent "them only" parking spaces. That's so they don't have to compete with any of the other ADA users for the, in one particular case, four almost always empty ADA spaces they used 8 regular spaces to create.
Those with a decent reason can be given permits,
Here's that arrogance again. "Decent reason"? You mean like "I work here"? Now you think people need a reason you approve of to be able to park at work?
those wanting the convenience could pay to reduce demand.
This is a staff permit lot and the people who used to park there get the privilege of paying more than $250/year for their parking permits. They never tow anyone parked illegally, they just give them a ticket. The worst they've ever done is boot one car, which of course meant that the person illegally parked there couldn't leave and open the space up for a legal user.
When someone drives to work, you can only reduce demand for parking by upping the fees so much. And when the demand increases because you are steadily and deliberately reducing supply, the system is wrong. This is our "Parking and Transit Services", which is a parking service in name only. They've publicly said their goal is to remove cars from campus. They've pushed so many staff and students off campus to find parking that they city is implementing half a dozen more "residential zones" around campus where you can park for a total of two hours unless you have a resident permit. There are already three such zones.