The bank bailout of 2008. Even though the banks failed the most basic rules of capitalism, there was no meaningful penalty for institutions or individuals.
The banks were not allowed to follow the most basic rules of capitalism. For example, a basic rule of capitalism is that you don't loan money to people who probably cannot pay you back. You don't want to be stuck with a foreclosure, you want the money back. CRA meant they had to make those loans if they wanted to stay in business ("stay in business" is a basic rule of capitalism).
In other words, the banks had some of the basic rules of capitalism changed by social policy makers ("everyone should be able to own a home", e.g.) who didn't consider that the other rules were still in play.
Dodd-Frank regulation is crocodile tears.
Dodd and Frank are two of the social policy engineers who failed basic engineering math. Banks cannot stay in business when they hold bad paper, so they're going to get rid of it. Don't force them to take bad paper in the first place and the problem goes away. Refuse to re-regulate them when it becomes obvious something needs to be done and the problem gets worse, not better. No, Billy Sue and Bobby Jo who make minimum wage not being able to afford to buy a three bedroom house in the suburbs is NOT a problem. It doesn't need federal regulation to fix.
They still engage in appallingly bad behavior because of unbridled greed.
It is not unbridled greed to want to stay in business. It's a basic rule of capitalism. Nobody sane runs a business to run it into the ground. If you want any businesses at all, you have to put up with the "unbridled greed" that means they can stay in business and make a profit. (The scare quotes are there for a reason, btw.)
In addition: Big Pharma and Oxycontin. HDMI cables.
Mobile communication protocols aren't voodoo. The rules are so well-understood that you can go damn near anywhere on the planet where there's even basic infrastructure and use the same mobile device you bought at Walmart in Des Moine.
Nice, but irrelevant. Unless, of course, you actually believe that these rules mean that every "mobile device" is the same as every other and that you only need to test one to have an answer.
Pilots seem to be fond of repeating that we simply can't understand all the possible effects of all mobile devices on aircraft instrumentation, but this is false. All these mobile devices communicate outside of themselves in a predictable, understood manner.
The issue is not limited to intentional radiators operating within defined standards, and not all unintentional radiators are the same. Other than that, you might be right.
The public will accept that there are good reasons for disabling devices on takeoff and landing.
And yet you've just argued vigorously that there are no good reasons because all "mobile devices" behave in a well-known and well-defined manner and that all possible effects upon aircraft instrumentation are well known.
The FAA needs to provide those reasons with an evidence-based approach.
The FAA has better things to spend taxpayer dollars on than finding every instance of every "mobile device" that doesn't follow your well-defined protocols or behave in the well-defined way you claim they all do.
It's ten or fifteen minutes at the start and end of a flight. You'll live if you have to turn your phone off for that short a period of time. You won't suffer a massive brain aneurysm if you can't listen to Blue Oyster Cult on your earbuds. Stop buying into the "must always be electronically connected" nonsense the cell phone companies spout and you'll live a happier life.
When someone tells me that they is likely to be massive devastation, I think these are significant details that the president should care about.
You admitted he was briefed about it. You don't have any evidence that he didn't care. A you-tube video of him not asking any questions is pretty silly evidence of anything. It's just as damning as the video of him being notified of the 9/11 attacks and not immediately "doing something", as if there was anything immediate he could do.
The fact is, he had nothing to do until the state governments asked, and despite your claim to the contrary, they did not ask. "Asking in the right way" is part of the process and they have people whose job it is to know how to do that and what to say. Pretending that they just didn't ask "the right way" is proof that the feds failed is nonsense, and it's just another attempt at putting the blame where it does not belong.
An impending crisis like a hurricane wrecking a major US city might be something a President should pay attention to. Especially one that had days of warning.
You have no evidence he wasn't paying attention. An impending crisis for a state might be something the governor should pay attention to, but you have plenty of evidence that the state governors didn't care. They could have asked for proactive help and chose not to. They CHOSE not to ask. It was their responsibility to ask and they CHOSE to ignore the problem. THEY are the ones you should be ranting about, not someone who was legally proscribed from helping because THEY chose not to ask for it.
The problem has always been what did he do before/during the crisis.
In the US system of government, he had nothing to do until there was an official request from the state. The fact that he didn't send in national guard troops four days ahead of time isn't a black mark on him, it's a failure of the state government that didn't want help -- until it was too late to be effective. The fact that he "went on vacation" as you accusingly put it is irrelevant because any requests for aide could have been responded to instantly no matter where he was, and the important fact is that the requests weren't made. He's not responsible for that. Stop trying to blame him for it.
There are many to blame here including the President. Only one of us is willing to acknowledge that.
Because only one of us mistakenly thinks it is true. The other one understands the concept of federal government and state responsibility, and that the states fell down on this one. They'd like to find someone else to blame, and they thank you for playing along.
Me too. For the last few years I've been able to wear mine as well, large Bose cover the ears ones, as long as I'm not plugged into anything.
Every Delta flight I've been on in the last few years has resulted in a demand that I turn them off, irrespective of whether they are plugged into anything. Not take them off, just turn them off.
United has mostly ignored them, but a few have asked me to turn them off. It got bad enough I contemplated bypassing the off switch, but it was just easier to put a piece of tape over the red LED.
I balance breaking the rules like this with the fact that by connecting into the plane's audio system I can actually hear and understand all the announcements, unless I turn off the headset which makes me deaf. Also I know that this audio device has no digital components that would radiate RF of any kind anyway.
I'd love to find a ***real*** analysis of consumer electronics including cellphone use on commercial aircraft.
This is kind of like asking for a real analysis of the effects of an asteroid strike in central Kansas. I have a hard enough time tracking down intermittent issues with real systems to even imagine trying to get hard documented proof of exactly which consumer devices (out of billions) in which aircraft (out of hundreds of thousands) in which locations (out of tens of thousands) will cause interference.
Aviation regulations are, in large part, trying to prevent even many low probability issues from becoming headline news. For the small aircraft pilot, it's mostly "don't do something stupid", but as you proceed up the chain into commercial aviation it becomes much tighter.
Here's just one example. A Part 91 pilot (private) is allowed to
attempt a landing in zero-zero conditions. He isn't allowed to actually make the landing unless there is a certain amount of flight visibility, but he can make the approach. (As an IFR pilot, I LOVE making approaches to 0/0.) The commercial guys cannot attempt an approach if the GROUND visibility is below their limit. (One difference: flight visibility is what the pilot sees -- and judges -- and ground is what the electronic devices on the ground say. Private pilots get to use their own judgement on visibility, commercial ones don't.)
An example of probability-based rules: mechanics cannot use just whatever bolt they have on hand to fix an airplane, they have to use one that is approved for that use in that airplane. The chances are that the cheaper generic will be just as good, but there are known cases when they weren't so the rules say "no".
And that's the kind of rule that covers electronic devices.
If it was about distractions, why can I read my dead tree book, or the Sky Mall catalog?
Because neither your dead tree book nor the Sky Mall catalog will create a distraction FOR THE PILOT, who is the critical part of the operation during landing and takeoff. You're a several stone lump of baggage as far as the system is concerned and distracting you from concentrating on the flight operation is not a problem of any kind.
But an e-ink display puts off less noise than wristwatch.
Depends on the display (which has a computer behind it, you know) and the watch. And whether the display is properly functioning and grounded/etc or not.
For that matter, they have TV screens showing Big Bang reruns on half the airplanes during takeoff and landing.
So you're being entertained. What's your problem? Those devices are installed in the system and have been tested in that use to determine if there is any interference. Your iPad hasn't.
If nothing like that happens during a plane crash, I'd be a pretty happy camper.
I'd prefer that there not be a crash in the first place. Commercial aviation is not supposed to be an e-ticket ride, even though most airlines deal only in etickets nowadays.
If that's the fear, then all consumer electronics should be banned from flying, just like guns.
There is no need to ban them when they can be just turned off. And sadly, there are too many consumer electronic devices in use to simply ban them, so the best compromise is to turn them off.
I've seen at least one device interfere. All this "proof" that they don't is just junk science. "We tested 1000 new consumer devices and none of them caused interference, so we've proved that such devices do not cause interference." Right. In comes device number 1001.
The random malfunction of consumer electronics potentially interacting with the comm/nav systems on a commercial jetliner has to be 5-10 orders of magnitude more rare than someone building a portable high-power RF white noise source and leaving it on during takeoff.
Citation required. Pulling numbers out of your... I'd say. I've seen interference. I've yet to see someone carrying a deliberate jammer, but since the current rules would make that a federal crime, I don't think we need another rule to deal with that. It's the inadvertent radiators (like a broken electronic device) that need to be dealt with, and since the wrong time to test each device is as one boards the aircraft, simply turning them off is the easiest solution.
What the hell is the problem anyway? For fifteen minutes at the beginning and end of a flight you can't use your iWhatever or eWhatsis. Big deal. Life is too short to get bent out of shape because of something so trivial.
The morning news was making a big deal of the fact that pilots can use iPads in the cockpit. This proves how safe they all are, they said. That's not true. It proves that those previously tested iPads aren't likely to cause interference, but more importantly, that if they do they are in the hands of the pilot/copilot who know they are being used and who can immediately turn them off if necessary. "Hey Bob, I saw you turn your iPad on and NAV2 went wonky. Try turning it off..."
Now imagine an iPad in the hands of passenger 32B during a critical phase of flight who turns it on and causes interference. The pilots don't know he just did that or where he is, so they first have to detect the interference and then try to work around it without being able to just turn the interfering device off. Yes, they can use the PA to ask people to turn things off (I've heard this before) but what if this jerk thinks "it's an iPad just like the one the pilot is using, it can't possibly be the cause, so I'll keep using it?"
The news guy also had this part exactly backwards: he asked whether you'd rather have an issue below 10,000 feet where the pilots are directly involved in flying the plane or above that where you're going 600 mph. His answer: below 10,000 feet. BZZZTTT.
Below 10,000', the sterile cockpit rules kick in for a very good reason. It is the time when everyone needs to concentrate on what he is doing -- like flying the plane or looking out the window to look for terrain or traffic. Below 10,000' is where the big iron mixes with the smaller stuff and there is more traffic to worry about. Below 10,000' is where the GROUND is, and where you will find almost all final approach courses and landing zones. Mistakes above 10,000' and in level flight give more time for correction than those at 1,000' while descending to land. Having an ILS or GPS failure while flying an approach is a much more serious issue than one that happens in the flight levels.
The last time I checked the president is the head of the administration.
The federal administration. And the last time I checked, the governor was the head of the state administration. Guess who is responsible for asking the federal government for aide in time of disaster. Wrong, not the President. It's the governor's job to ask for aide, and if the governor refuses to ask, the federal government is not supposed to just waltz in and take over. It's called "United States" for a reason.
In every state of the Union, it is the governor who makes the request for federal disaster assistance, not the President who picks up the phone and says "we're sending stuff whether you like it or not". Most governors are proactive. The ones involved in Katrina weren't.
Part of my dislike for Bush was that he can't be bothered with details. As president I think that this is part of the job.
You've got to be kidding. The details of running a massive federal government are supposed to be dealt with at the level of a President? Do you realize just how LARGE the US government is? He has a cabinet for a reason. And each cabinet member has assistants and aides and such. No, being a 'detail man' is not part of the President's job and cannot possibly be.
About a day before the storm hit, he was fully briefed on the projections (there is a video of this) and the projections were close to reality. He left it to his underlings...
You mean the governors of the states involved. They are not his underlings. They are elected officials who have the responsibility of dealing with the "details" of getting federal assistance when they want it.
... and went on vacation.
You do realize that "on vacation" for a President includes a complete mobile communications facility with secure communications with anyplace in the world, don't you? That had any governor stepped up to the plate and did his job, any requests that the President had to deal with himself would have been in his hands for approval within seconds of them being made. He cannot approve requests that are never made, or are made too late to be off any value.
This was not generosity, they just didn't bother to roll a truck when the previous resident cancelled
Or they rolled a truck and the installer went for coffee and did a "pencil-whip disconnect", as they called it back then.
I lived in a college town and the cable co had an issue with people who were getting cable for free by just plugging in. They couldn't prosecute anyone for cable theft because of the known issue of pencil-whips. So, they did a complete system audit. Every pole, every box. Everyone who was connected but wasn't paying got offered a deal on signing up for service. Anyone who refused got cut off.
Then they went back a few months later to see if anyone they had cut off was mysteriously reconnected. THOSE people were targets for cable theft investigations.
Really? When was the last time you heard of a copyright troll admitting to wrongdoing in the US?
When was the last time you heard one admitting to wrongdoing in Canada? The "admission" the summary talks about isn't actually there, it's the claim of Michael Geist (from whom the summary "written" by "anonymous" was copied almost verbatim. Can you spell "plagiarism"? ).
Canipre didn't admit to being a copyright troll, nor did they admit to wrongdoing.
If you actually read TFA, Canpire actually admits that acting civilly and reasonably with infringers is better and more effective than being total dicks.
And TFA also says that some infringers need more, and that Canipre knows the most effective way to get a takedown is by using the legal methods and not just asking politely.
As further evidence I present that stupid 'reality' TV show Sister Wives, where that behavior is paraded openly on television.
There are a lot of 'reality' shows today that show criminal activity openly. Moonshiners, The Devils Ride, and Amish Mafia to name just three. (All on Discovery, it appears. Hmmm...)
I wondered how these people could allow TV crews to come and tape their illegal activities without worrying that the police would just use the tapes in court. Tim the Moonshiner made a comment during an episode that for some reason the cops cannot use this material, they have to actually see them break the law. He said he had a bunch of feds at his door with pictures asking him to admit to doing things, but they didn't cuff him and take him away, so just seeing it on camera must not be enough.
I mean, there must be some reason why the feds are still going to grant him a license to distill legally even after seeing him selling off his backup stash for cash to build his legal still.
Amen to that. I've got a M515; unfortunately, its replacement battery is starting to die off too, so I'm afraid this time it really is the end.
Why not replaceitagain? These are just three of the places I found with a simple "m515 replacement battery" query to google. I did mine a few years ago and it wasn't hard.
Or rather you can deter violence by not pissing everyone off and becoming friends with them.
Yes, this is the "all unicorns and glitter except a few spots of Nickelodeon slime that haven't gotten the message yet" philosophy. Except it's ignoring the slime spots altogether and hoping for the best.
"In space" doesn't mean "hard vacuum." The low mass (so they can carry enough of them) combined with the large surface area (to mimic a large object) will make them decelerate rapidly enough that they won't confuse anyone for very long. Then remember that the real ICBM has been tracked from very close to the surface, so if one missile suddenly turns into 99 missiles slowing down very quickly and 1 that keeps the same trajectory, you can be pretty confident you know which one is real and which is chaff. Then you'll see one missile descending into the atmosphere and 99 that aren't, the jig will be up.
Actually, you don't even need that. As each ICBM reaches space, it could pop out a few dozen mylar balloon decoys. The balloons will cool rapidly in space,
And because of their tiny mass will almost immediately slow to zero velocity. If your DEW radars cannot differentiate between something moving at a considerable percent of the speed of sound and a balloon floating around with the wind, you need a better DEW line. "Hey, look, Bob, those incoming missles that were targeting Memphis are now going at only 120 knots and are aimed at the North Pole!"
Once everyone is solidly connected to a world wide electric grid and each country depends on the excess capacity of another country on the other side of the planet, what are you gonna do, attack the other countries and eliminate part of your won power supply.
No, you'll just turn off the supply to the country on the other side of the planet that is depending on your excess capacity. Then nuke them, if necessary.
Oil dependence is already enough of a hot button issue, do you really imagine any country would put itself into a position of dependence on someone else's excess capacity of electricity that can be turned off at a moment's notice? It's relatively easy to stockpile oil (we have a national reserve), but stockpiling electricity when you are dependent for daily operation on someone else's production is a lot harder.
If 1000 to 1100 warheads is sufficient for the most paranoid people on the planet who are fully informed about the situation,
I assume you are referring to the Obama administration officials who came up with the 1000-1100 number here. What makes you think they are the most paranoid people on the planet? I'd say they were probably leaning mostly towards the world being all unicorns and glitter except for small pockets of Nickelodeon slime that haven't gotten the message yet.
Each CueCat has a unique identifier that is appended to the scanned encrypted data. The original software was designed to track you based on everything you scanned.
Oh, yeah. I remember now. I never used that software, I used the perl script.
I have two, and I used one a month ago. Not on a C64, on a real computer.
I wasn't the one who came up with all the privacy-invading uses.
Ummm, it read bar codes. Wasn't that it? And you actually had to rub the cat over the object being read. Now I have an app on my phone that does much more. Is it a privacy invading app, too? I can see what book you're holding, why is it a problem if I can also scan the ISBN?
What privacy invading issues might you be referring to?
And then they force all their authors to use an email address in that domain, and then all their authors get rejected from all the modern web services that use the broken email validation scripts running rampant.
Not only are ignorant web programmers making up their own limits on local-parts of an email address (e.g., "+ invalid"), they've created a 2-4 character limit on the TLD. People in.museum and.travel are already hosed, as well as anyone using an internationalized TLD that has at least one example that is 22 characters long. It would be wonderful for Amazon to be the next victim.
It's zero effort for me, because my system updates the daylight savings rules automatically. I wonder why yours doesn't.
1. Systems without an automated system update, or an automated system update method that is no longer supported, do not update automatically no matter how much you want them to. I have systems like that. A lot of them are embedded. Older hardware rarely has manufacturer support for firmware updates, and you may have to actually go to the device to update it (travel takes time and costs money, and my boss calls that 'effort').
2. Systems that are not connected to the Internet, or are connected via a very slow link, rarely have an automated system update method. I have systems like that.
3. Systems that are production systems and can't justify failures based on broken updates (including updates that break existing processes) only update automatically if the system manager is an idiot. Too many things break on computers that update automatically for anyone who cares about uptime to allow that to happen. I deal in remote sensing. I have a lot of these systems. I cannot afford to have a remote system fail to boot because the updated kernel or other software doesn't run on that hardware or is buggy. I also have a dozen nearly identical servers that run 24/7. One of those I've reserved for me, and any updates get tested on that. If they don't break that system, then I manually update the rest. That's called "effort" by my boss.
It's nice that your Android phone gets time from the cell system and takes zero effort to know the right time. It's nice you can trust the update servers not to break your systems, or can afford to spend time fixing things that weren't really broken before the update happened. There are lots of people who are not in the same boat, and ignoring them by saying "it's zero effort to make this change" is silly at best.
For the person who thought I said that turning something off was harder than turning something on, of course not. Turning off automatic DST on any system is harder than DOING NOTHING and allowing it to continue. It is non-zero effort. And when that checkbox is "enable automatic DST", then it is not just a simple uncheck to convert the system to permanent DST, so that's why changing to permanent DST is more effort than changing to permanent standard time.
For the AC that claims I'm a moron because it takes him zero effort to turn off automatic DST, then put up or shut up. What zero-effort method would you use? "Log in, find the right static zoneinfo file, copy it to/etc/localtime...". That's non-zero effort. Not world-shattering, but non-zero, an depends on how hard it is to log into that system in the first place. And find the right zoneinfo, if it has it to start with.
Point: changing the existing system is not non-zero effort. Zero effort is NOT changing the system. The claim that making this change (getting rid of DST) is zero effort is patently absurd. Period.
What you seem to forget is that the current system ALREADY incur exactly the same effort.
No, it does not. Changing nothing takes zero effort. The current system is already in place, and any effort required today is postponed effort from the last change. Changing the day that DST kicks in, including "never", is more effort. That's the only point I'm trying to make. Not "too much", not "impossible", not "end of the world effort", just that the claim that making this change would take zero effort is a lie.
With the slight difference that this time would be the last one, of course.
You assume. It was just as safe to assume that the last time it was changed was the last time. There will be no guarantee that someone won't realize that yes, indeed, the heating/cooling/lighting costs and the safety of the children walking to school really did justify the DST changes. And that they won't decide that the costs of bouncing the open/close times of everything around to replace a twice a year change to a clock will not be worth the gain and that changing the clock is easier and costs less.
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The bank bailout of 2008. Even though the banks failed the most basic rules of capitalism, there was no meaningful penalty for institutions or individuals.
The banks were not allowed to follow the most basic rules of capitalism. For example, a basic rule of capitalism is that you don't loan money to people who probably cannot pay you back. You don't want to be stuck with a foreclosure, you want the money back. CRA meant they had to make those loans if they wanted to stay in business ("stay in business" is a basic rule of capitalism). In other words, the banks had some of the basic rules of capitalism changed by social policy makers ("everyone should be able to own a home", e.g.) who didn't consider that the other rules were still in play.
Dodd-Frank regulation is crocodile tears.
Dodd and Frank are two of the social policy engineers who failed basic engineering math. Banks cannot stay in business when they hold bad paper, so they're going to get rid of it. Don't force them to take bad paper in the first place and the problem goes away. Refuse to re-regulate them when it becomes obvious something needs to be done and the problem gets worse, not better. No, Billy Sue and Bobby Jo who make minimum wage not being able to afford to buy a three bedroom house in the suburbs is NOT a problem. It doesn't need federal regulation to fix.
They still engage in appallingly bad behavior because of unbridled greed.
It is not unbridled greed to want to stay in business. It's a basic rule of capitalism. Nobody sane runs a business to run it into the ground. If you want any businesses at all, you have to put up with the "unbridled greed" that means they can stay in business and make a profit. (The scare quotes are there for a reason, btw.)
In addition: Big Pharma and Oxycontin. HDMI cables.
HDMI cables are a nefarious big-business plot?
There is nothing about 3D printing that makes it any different then any other form of fabrication. It's not even cheaper really.
3d printing turns making a gun into a script-kiddie kind of operation instead of requiring some technical skills.
Mobile communication protocols aren't voodoo. The rules are so well-understood that you can go damn near anywhere on the planet where there's even basic infrastructure and use the same mobile device you bought at Walmart in Des Moine.
Nice, but irrelevant. Unless, of course, you actually believe that these rules mean that every "mobile device" is the same as every other and that you only need to test one to have an answer.
Pilots seem to be fond of repeating that we simply can't understand all the possible effects of all mobile devices on aircraft instrumentation, but this is false. All these mobile devices communicate outside of themselves in a predictable, understood manner.
The issue is not limited to intentional radiators operating within defined standards, and not all unintentional radiators are the same. Other than that, you might be right.
The public will accept that there are good reasons for disabling devices on takeoff and landing.
And yet you've just argued vigorously that there are no good reasons because all "mobile devices" behave in a well-known and well-defined manner and that all possible effects upon aircraft instrumentation are well known.
The FAA needs to provide those reasons with an evidence-based approach.
The FAA has better things to spend taxpayer dollars on than finding every instance of every "mobile device" that doesn't follow your well-defined protocols or behave in the well-defined way you claim they all do.
It's ten or fifteen minutes at the start and end of a flight. You'll live if you have to turn your phone off for that short a period of time. You won't suffer a massive brain aneurysm if you can't listen to Blue Oyster Cult on your earbuds. Stop buying into the "must always be electronically connected" nonsense the cell phone companies spout and you'll live a happier life.
When someone tells me that they is likely to be massive devastation, I think these are significant details that the president should care about.
You admitted he was briefed about it. You don't have any evidence that he didn't care. A you-tube video of him not asking any questions is pretty silly evidence of anything. It's just as damning as the video of him being notified of the 9/11 attacks and not immediately "doing something", as if there was anything immediate he could do.
The fact is, he had nothing to do until the state governments asked, and despite your claim to the contrary, they did not ask. "Asking in the right way" is part of the process and they have people whose job it is to know how to do that and what to say. Pretending that they just didn't ask "the right way" is proof that the feds failed is nonsense, and it's just another attempt at putting the blame where it does not belong.
An impending crisis like a hurricane wrecking a major US city might be something a President should pay attention to. Especially one that had days of warning.
You have no evidence he wasn't paying attention. An impending crisis for a state might be something the governor should pay attention to, but you have plenty of evidence that the state governors didn't care. They could have asked for proactive help and chose not to. They CHOSE not to ask. It was their responsibility to ask and they CHOSE to ignore the problem. THEY are the ones you should be ranting about, not someone who was legally proscribed from helping because THEY chose not to ask for it.
The problem has always been what did he do before/during the crisis.
In the US system of government, he had nothing to do until there was an official request from the state. The fact that he didn't send in national guard troops four days ahead of time isn't a black mark on him, it's a failure of the state government that didn't want help -- until it was too late to be effective. The fact that he "went on vacation" as you accusingly put it is irrelevant because any requests for aide could have been responded to instantly no matter where he was, and the important fact is that the requests weren't made. He's not responsible for that. Stop trying to blame him for it.
There are many to blame here including the President. Only one of us is willing to acknowledge that.
Because only one of us mistakenly thinks it is true. The other one understands the concept of federal government and state responsibility, and that the states fell down on this one. They'd like to find someone else to blame, and they thank you for playing along.
Me too. For the last few years I've been able to wear mine as well, large Bose cover the ears ones, as long as I'm not plugged into anything.
Every Delta flight I've been on in the last few years has resulted in a demand that I turn them off, irrespective of whether they are plugged into anything. Not take them off, just turn them off.
United has mostly ignored them, but a few have asked me to turn them off. It got bad enough I contemplated bypassing the off switch, but it was just easier to put a piece of tape over the red LED.
I balance breaking the rules like this with the fact that by connecting into the plane's audio system I can actually hear and understand all the announcements, unless I turn off the headset which makes me deaf. Also I know that this audio device has no digital components that would radiate RF of any kind anyway.
I'd love to find a ***real*** analysis of consumer electronics including cellphone use on commercial aircraft.
This is kind of like asking for a real analysis of the effects of an asteroid strike in central Kansas. I have a hard enough time tracking down intermittent issues with real systems to even imagine trying to get hard documented proof of exactly which consumer devices (out of billions) in which aircraft (out of hundreds of thousands) in which locations (out of tens of thousands) will cause interference.
Aviation regulations are, in large part, trying to prevent even many low probability issues from becoming headline news. For the small aircraft pilot, it's mostly "don't do something stupid", but as you proceed up the chain into commercial aviation it becomes much tighter.
Here's just one example. A Part 91 pilot (private) is allowed to attempt a landing in zero-zero conditions. He isn't allowed to actually make the landing unless there is a certain amount of flight visibility, but he can make the approach. (As an IFR pilot, I LOVE making approaches to 0/0.) The commercial guys cannot attempt an approach if the GROUND visibility is below their limit. (One difference: flight visibility is what the pilot sees -- and judges -- and ground is what the electronic devices on the ground say. Private pilots get to use their own judgement on visibility, commercial ones don't.)
An example of probability-based rules: mechanics cannot use just whatever bolt they have on hand to fix an airplane, they have to use one that is approved for that use in that airplane. The chances are that the cheaper generic will be just as good, but there are known cases when they weren't so the rules say "no".
And that's the kind of rule that covers electronic devices.
If it was about distractions, why can I read my dead tree book, or the Sky Mall catalog?
Because neither your dead tree book nor the Sky Mall catalog will create a distraction FOR THE PILOT, who is the critical part of the operation during landing and takeoff. You're a several stone lump of baggage as far as the system is concerned and distracting you from concentrating on the flight operation is not a problem of any kind.
But an e-ink display puts off less noise than wristwatch.
Depends on the display (which has a computer behind it, you know) and the watch. And whether the display is properly functioning and grounded/etc or not.
For that matter, they have TV screens showing Big Bang reruns on half the airplanes during takeoff and landing.
So you're being entertained. What's your problem? Those devices are installed in the system and have been tested in that use to determine if there is any interference. Your iPad hasn't.
If nothing like that happens during a plane crash, I'd be a pretty happy camper.
I'd prefer that there not be a crash in the first place. Commercial aviation is not supposed to be an e-ticket ride, even though most airlines deal only in etickets nowadays.
If that's the fear, then all consumer electronics should be banned from flying, just like guns.
There is no need to ban them when they can be just turned off. And sadly, there are too many consumer electronic devices in use to simply ban them, so the best compromise is to turn them off.
I've seen at least one device interfere. All this "proof" that they don't is just junk science. "We tested 1000 new consumer devices and none of them caused interference, so we've proved that such devices do not cause interference." Right. In comes device number 1001.
The random malfunction of consumer electronics potentially interacting with the comm/nav systems on a commercial jetliner has to be 5-10 orders of magnitude more rare than someone building a portable high-power RF white noise source and leaving it on during takeoff.
Citation required. Pulling numbers out of your ... I'd say. I've seen interference. I've yet to see someone carrying a deliberate jammer, but since the current rules would make that a federal crime, I don't think we need another rule to deal with that. It's the inadvertent radiators (like a broken electronic device) that need to be dealt with, and since the wrong time to test each device is as one boards the aircraft, simply turning them off is the easiest solution.
What the hell is the problem anyway? For fifteen minutes at the beginning and end of a flight you can't use your iWhatever or eWhatsis. Big deal. Life is too short to get bent out of shape because of something so trivial.
The morning news was making a big deal of the fact that pilots can use iPads in the cockpit. This proves how safe they all are, they said. That's not true. It proves that those previously tested iPads aren't likely to cause interference, but more importantly, that if they do they are in the hands of the pilot/copilot who know they are being used and who can immediately turn them off if necessary. "Hey Bob, I saw you turn your iPad on and NAV2 went wonky. Try turning it off..."
Now imagine an iPad in the hands of passenger 32B during a critical phase of flight who turns it on and causes interference. The pilots don't know he just did that or where he is, so they first have to detect the interference and then try to work around it without being able to just turn the interfering device off. Yes, they can use the PA to ask people to turn things off (I've heard this before) but what if this jerk thinks "it's an iPad just like the one the pilot is using, it can't possibly be the cause, so I'll keep using it?"
The news guy also had this part exactly backwards: he asked whether you'd rather have an issue below 10,000 feet where the pilots are directly involved in flying the plane or above that where you're going 600 mph. His answer: below 10,000 feet. BZZZTTT.
Below 10,000', the sterile cockpit rules kick in for a very good reason. It is the time when everyone needs to concentrate on what he is doing -- like flying the plane or looking out the window to look for terrain or traffic. Below 10,000' is where the big iron mixes with the smaller stuff and there is more traffic to worry about. Below 10,000' is where the GROUND is, and where you will find almost all final approach courses and landing zones. Mistakes above 10,000' and in level flight give more time for correction than those at 1,000' while descending to land. Having an ILS or GPS failure while flying an approach is a much more serious issue than one that happens in the flight levels.
The last time I checked the president is the head of the administration.
The federal administration. And the last time I checked, the governor was the head of the state administration. Guess who is responsible for asking the federal government for aide in time of disaster. Wrong, not the President. It's the governor's job to ask for aide, and if the governor refuses to ask, the federal government is not supposed to just waltz in and take over. It's called "United States" for a reason.
In every state of the Union, it is the governor who makes the request for federal disaster assistance, not the President who picks up the phone and says "we're sending stuff whether you like it or not". Most governors are proactive. The ones involved in Katrina weren't.
Part of my dislike for Bush was that he can't be bothered with details. As president I think that this is part of the job.
You've got to be kidding. The details of running a massive federal government are supposed to be dealt with at the level of a President? Do you realize just how LARGE the US government is? He has a cabinet for a reason. And each cabinet member has assistants and aides and such. No, being a 'detail man' is not part of the President's job and cannot possibly be.
About a day before the storm hit, he was fully briefed on the projections (there is a video of this) and the projections were close to reality. He left it to his underlings ...
You mean the governors of the states involved. They are not his underlings. They are elected officials who have the responsibility of dealing with the "details" of getting federal assistance when they want it.
... and went on vacation.
You do realize that "on vacation" for a President includes a complete mobile communications facility with secure communications with anyplace in the world, don't you? That had any governor stepped up to the plate and did his job, any requests that the President had to deal with himself would have been in his hands for approval within seconds of them being made. He cannot approve requests that are never made, or are made too late to be off any value.
This was not generosity, they just didn't bother to roll a truck when the previous resident cancelled
Or they rolled a truck and the installer went for coffee and did a "pencil-whip disconnect", as they called it back then.
I lived in a college town and the cable co had an issue with people who were getting cable for free by just plugging in. They couldn't prosecute anyone for cable theft because of the known issue of pencil-whips. So, they did a complete system audit. Every pole, every box. Everyone who was connected but wasn't paying got offered a deal on signing up for service. Anyone who refused got cut off.
Then they went back a few months later to see if anyone they had cut off was mysteriously reconnected. THOSE people were targets for cable theft investigations.
Really? When was the last time you heard of a copyright troll admitting to wrongdoing in the US?
When was the last time you heard one admitting to wrongdoing in Canada? The "admission" the summary talks about isn't actually there, it's the claim of Michael Geist (from whom the summary "written" by "anonymous" was copied almost verbatim. Can you spell "plagiarism"? ).
Canipre didn't admit to being a copyright troll, nor did they admit to wrongdoing.
If you actually read TFA, Canpire actually admits that acting civilly and reasonably with infringers is better and more effective than being total dicks.
And TFA also says that some infringers need more, and that Canipre knows the most effective way to get a takedown is by using the legal methods and not just asking politely.
As further evidence I present that stupid 'reality' TV show Sister Wives, where that behavior is paraded openly on television.
There are a lot of 'reality' shows today that show criminal activity openly. Moonshiners, The Devils Ride, and Amish Mafia to name just three. (All on Discovery, it appears. Hmmm...)
I wondered how these people could allow TV crews to come and tape their illegal activities without worrying that the police would just use the tapes in court. Tim the Moonshiner made a comment during an episode that for some reason the cops cannot use this material, they have to actually see them break the law. He said he had a bunch of feds at his door with pictures asking him to admit to doing things, but they didn't cuff him and take him away, so just seeing it on camera must not be enough.
I mean, there must be some reason why the feds are still going to grant him a license to distill legally even after seeing him selling off his backup stash for cash to build his legal still.
Amen to that. I've got a M515; unfortunately, its replacement battery is starting to die off too, so I'm afraid this time it really is the end.
Why not replace it again? These are just three of the places I found with a simple "m515 replacement battery" query to google. I did mine a few years ago and it wasn't hard.
"The moves followed concerns raised by the companyâ(TM)s auditors over more than $1.5 million payments to Intradeâ(TM)s founder, John Delaney,
He's one of the Q, what does HE need human money for?
Or rather you can deter violence by not pissing everyone off and becoming friends with them.
Yes, this is the "all unicorns and glitter except a few spots of Nickelodeon slime that haven't gotten the message yet" philosophy. Except it's ignoring the slime spots altogether and hoping for the best.
"In space" doesn't mean "hard vacuum." The low mass (so they can carry enough of them) combined with the large surface area (to mimic a large object) will make them decelerate rapidly enough that they won't confuse anyone for very long. Then remember that the real ICBM has been tracked from very close to the surface, so if one missile suddenly turns into 99 missiles slowing down very quickly and 1 that keeps the same trajectory, you can be pretty confident you know which one is real and which is chaff. Then you'll see one missile descending into the atmosphere and 99 that aren't, the jig will be up.
Actually, you don't even need that. As each ICBM reaches space, it could pop out a few dozen mylar balloon decoys. The balloons will cool rapidly in space,
And because of their tiny mass will almost immediately slow to zero velocity. If your DEW radars cannot differentiate between something moving at a considerable percent of the speed of sound and a balloon floating around with the wind, you need a better DEW line. "Hey, look, Bob, those incoming missles that were targeting Memphis are now going at only 120 knots and are aimed at the North Pole!"
Once everyone is solidly connected to a world wide electric grid and each country depends on the excess capacity of another country on the other side of the planet, what are you gonna do, attack the other countries and eliminate part of your won power supply.
No, you'll just turn off the supply to the country on the other side of the planet that is depending on your excess capacity. Then nuke them, if necessary.
Oil dependence is already enough of a hot button issue, do you really imagine any country would put itself into a position of dependence on someone else's excess capacity of electricity that can be turned off at a moment's notice? It's relatively easy to stockpile oil (we have a national reserve), but stockpiling electricity when you are dependent for daily operation on someone else's production is a lot harder.
If 1000 to 1100 warheads is sufficient for the most paranoid people on the planet who are fully informed about the situation,
I assume you are referring to the Obama administration officials who came up with the 1000-1100 number here. What makes you think they are the most paranoid people on the planet? I'd say they were probably leaning mostly towards the world being all unicorns and glitter except for small pockets of Nickelodeon slime that haven't gotten the message yet.
Each CueCat has a unique identifier that is appended to the scanned encrypted data. The original software was designed to track you based on everything you scanned.
Oh, yeah. I remember now. I never used that software, I used the perl script.
Wow, people still remember the Cue:Cat. :-)
I have two, and I used one a month ago. Not on a C64, on a real computer.
I wasn't the one who came up with all the privacy-invading uses.
Ummm, it read bar codes. Wasn't that it? And you actually had to rub the cat over the object being read. Now I have an app on my phone that does much more. Is it a privacy invading app, too? I can see what book you're holding, why is it a problem if I can also scan the ISBN?
What privacy invading issues might you be referring to?
"We called at 9 a.m. and there was no response," a government official from South Korea said. The line is tested each day."
Maybe they were all doing a duck-and-cover drill at the time and couldn't answer the phone?
... gets the top level domain: Amazon
And then they force all their authors to use an email address in that domain, and then all their authors get rejected from all the modern web services that use the broken email validation scripts running rampant.
Not only are ignorant web programmers making up their own limits on local-parts of an email address (e.g., "+ invalid"), they've created a 2-4 character limit on the TLD. People in .museum and .travel are already hosed, as well as anyone using an internationalized TLD that has at least one example that is 22 characters long. It would be wonderful for Amazon to be the next victim.
It's zero effort for me, because my system updates the daylight savings rules automatically. I wonder why yours doesn't.
1. Systems without an automated system update, or an automated system update method that is no longer supported, do not update automatically no matter how much you want them to. I have systems like that. A lot of them are embedded. Older hardware rarely has manufacturer support for firmware updates, and you may have to actually go to the device to update it (travel takes time and costs money, and my boss calls that 'effort').
2. Systems that are not connected to the Internet, or are connected via a very slow link, rarely have an automated system update method. I have systems like that.
3. Systems that are production systems and can't justify failures based on broken updates (including updates that break existing processes) only update automatically if the system manager is an idiot. Too many things break on computers that update automatically for anyone who cares about uptime to allow that to happen. I deal in remote sensing. I have a lot of these systems. I cannot afford to have a remote system fail to boot because the updated kernel or other software doesn't run on that hardware or is buggy. I also have a dozen nearly identical servers that run 24/7. One of those I've reserved for me, and any updates get tested on that. If they don't break that system, then I manually update the rest. That's called "effort" by my boss.
It's nice that your Android phone gets time from the cell system and takes zero effort to know the right time. It's nice you can trust the update servers not to break your systems, or can afford to spend time fixing things that weren't really broken before the update happened. There are lots of people who are not in the same boat, and ignoring them by saying "it's zero effort to make this change" is silly at best.
For the person who thought I said that turning something off was harder than turning something on, of course not. Turning off automatic DST on any system is harder than DOING NOTHING and allowing it to continue. It is non-zero effort. And when that checkbox is "enable automatic DST", then it is not just a simple uncheck to convert the system to permanent DST, so that's why changing to permanent DST is more effort than changing to permanent standard time.
For the AC that claims I'm a moron because it takes him zero effort to turn off automatic DST, then put up or shut up. What zero-effort method would you use? "Log in, find the right static zoneinfo file, copy it to /etc/localtime...". That's non-zero effort. Not world-shattering, but non-zero, an depends on how hard it is to log into that system in the first place. And find the right zoneinfo, if it has it to start with.
Point: changing the existing system is not non-zero effort. Zero effort is NOT changing the system. The claim that making this change (getting rid of DST) is zero effort is patently absurd. Period.
What you seem to forget is that the current system ALREADY incur exactly the same effort.
No, it does not. Changing nothing takes zero effort. The current system is already in place, and any effort required today is postponed effort from the last change. Changing the day that DST kicks in, including "never", is more effort. That's the only point I'm trying to make. Not "too much", not "impossible", not "end of the world effort", just that the claim that making this change would take zero effort is a lie.
With the slight difference that this time would be the last one, of course.
You assume. It was just as safe to assume that the last time it was changed was the last time. There will be no guarantee that someone won't realize that yes, indeed, the heating/cooling/lighting costs and the safety of the children walking to school really did justify the DST changes. And that they won't decide that the costs of bouncing the open/close times of everything around to replace a twice a year change to a clock will not be worth the gain and that changing the clock is easier and costs less.