"Nutritious fruit" isn't a particularly descriptive label,
And the question wasn't "can you describe a guava", it was "do you know what one is". "A fruit" is the correct answer, nutritious or not. The answer to the question that was asked is "yes".
if I had the idea the other person knew anything about gauvas my answer to the question "Do you know what a guava is?" would probably be "not really".
Do you judge your knowledge of something against what you think the other person knows all the time? Would you tell Mario Andretti, were he to ask you "do you know how to drive?" that "no, I don't"? Poor guy, if everyone did that, he'd never be able to use a cab or hire a limo.
Really I think I better questions would be "Is cloud computing related to weather?" and then we wouldn't be having this debate.
I'm still wondering why we're having this debate, because I'm wondering why a stupid poll intended to make "cloud" look more relevant and important and to sell "cloud services" to more IT people is worth discussing here. Worthless questions that don't say anything about anything, but can be spun to make Joe Average American look stupid by a techology based blog. That's the only "stuff that's important" I can see here.
Since you've just admitted that you know what it is, the honest answer would be 'yes'. Now, if the question was "do you know what it looks like?", you'd have to say "no".
You can ask someone if they know what a Pontiac Grand Pre is (it is a CAR), but they might have no idea how to pick one out of a used-car lot.
We know that 54% of people feel like they don't know what cloud computing is, we also know that 51% of people are so uniformed that they think cloud computing has something to do with weather.
No, we don't know that. The question was whether is was affected by the weather. A Pontiac Grand Pre doesn't have "something to do with the weather", but it certainly can be affected by the weather. (The gas milage of most cars is affected by the density of the air, and thus the weather. Icy roads will make driving a Pontiac Grand Pre harder.)
Okay, despite his confusion, at least he admitted he was ignorant about the subject. At least he didn't go and form a strong opinion and start arguing about a subject he knows nothing about.
And, from reading TFA, neither did those 51% who thought that weather would interfere with the cloud. They were asked about it and they answered. They weren't protesting on the streets demanding something be done about the weather to protect their access to the cloud.
You just can't have this many adult people who hate thinking, who embrace anti-intellectualism, and expect to remain prosperous.
So you think that people who don't know what the rather nebulous concept of "the cloud" (which is quite appropriate since "clouds" are already nebulous and consist of many different kinds) is "hate thinking" etc. etc.? Quite a leap, I'd say.
They do mean well but they tend to be childish, indulgent, and haven't the maturity to overcome their own thoughts and their own worries.
And people who rant about others who simply don't care about technical things are grown up, mature individuals who are fastidious? By the way, I think you want to call them "self-indulgent", because most people are indugent of others.
I am seriously wondering just how hard it is for an American to immigrate to a small Western European nation and become a naturalized citizen.
I sense that this statement is much like the random movie or TV star who tries to influence voting trends by claiming that "if X wins, I'm moving to England" or similar. It's not hard to move to Europe, but why you'd want to become a citizen there is a mystery. You'd just be stuck in the same kind of situation where you'd threaten to "move to the US" if politics didn't go the way you wanted.
Yes but in the second instance, the correct follow up would be, "Do you think birds are dinosaurs", and if a majority answered no, than the original implication of ignorance on a large part of America would be correct.
Birds are not dinosaurs, any more than humans are single cell protozoans. If you truly believe in macroevolution, of the kind that can create new species and animals from existing ones, then you must believe that things CHANGE over time. That is, they aren't the same anymore. You must answer "no" to that question if you are to be honest.
And if you don't believe in macroevolution, just microevolution (the kind that causes birds to develop different beaks to deal with different environments, but they are still birds), then you will still say "no".
And, of course, a creationist will say "no", as well.
Your question does nothing to differentiate between what you are obviously trying to imply about the ignorance or lack thereof of a person based on a belief or disbelief in evolution.
I would find lifting the ban for cameras and GPS receivers entirely sufficient.
Why do you need them? So you can take pictures of other people stuck in the same airplane with you while you are taking off and landing? You can use a camera during flight, why isn't that good enough?
And GPS? You know where you are -- stuck in a long round tin box somewhere between where you took off and where you landed. You aren't navigating so you don't need more information than that. You aren't going to go geocaching. You probably won't need a waypoint to find your way back to your seat from the loo. GPS receivers are radio equipment, and radio equipment has oscillators that can leak and interfere.
Yeah, it's cool that you could plot your course when you get home later, but hardly a "need".
Chrome has been doing them since, like, forever. I think it's fantastic, personally. I dont want the browser to nag me when it's time to update. Just do it...
You probably also don't have 100 computer semi-literates using Chrome for mission critical applications that will all call you at the same time when those mission critical apps stop working.
Automatic updates are fine for people who don't care if the program stops working for some unexplained reason, or who can either debug the problem themselves or put off finding a solution until they have some free time. Or for people who make a living off of debugging other people's computer problems.
Automatic updates are dangerous for high reliability systems, mission critical applications, or anything that is supposed to run unattended. Anyone who has worked in IT for any length of time will have memories of when some program decided to update itself and made itself fail. (E.g., "Firefox has detected that the following plugins are incompatible with the current version and disabled them:")
If they really were a threat to the flight safety, they would just confiscate it before departure, and give it back to you after landing.
One fine day I flew from Schipol to someplace in the US. As I was going through security in the land below sea level, they noticed I was carrying a shortwave radio. A simple device, really. About the size of a deck of cards, maybe a bit larger. Certainly not the boom-box sized thing that brought down the flight over Lockerbee, Scotland.
OMG, you can't take that on the airplane, they said. "I know about turning things off, and I won't be using it anyway while on board". OMG, you can't take that on the airplane. Give it to us, they said, we'll give it to the Captain and they'll give it back to you when you land.
Well, that was a better option than having to throw it away, so I relented.
During the flight I started to look through the In Flight Shopping catalog. As I flipped the pages, I came across -- a shortwave radio. For sale. On board. Give them money, they'll hand it to you. On board. Not the same model, but same concept. For just $60 US, anyone could be a successful terrorist and convert my flight into a flaming heap of twisted, sinking to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean metal.
I rang the call button. The fellow who came around turned out to be the purser. I held up the catalog and pointed. I was ready for a good argument and strong words. He said "oh, you must be Mr. Smith. Hold on a moment." He walked up to the front of the plane and came back with a yellow envelope with my name on it and handed it to me. Yes, my radio. I really could be trusted with such a nefarious device on board. He apologized for the overzealous security people and we both had a laugh.
Another flight, another country. I was carrying a bag full of tools, and had a Swiss army knife (official Victorinox) in my pocket. I put it in the bag to go through the x ray. The fellow at the xray asked me "do you have a Swiss army knife?" Why yes, I pulled it from the bag and showed it to him. No, you can't carry that on board. Give it to us, we'll give it to the pilot and you'll get it back at the end of the flight. Yes, that's what happened.
And exactly the same thing happened to the person I was travelling with as they followed me through. Her's was a smaller version, but still bagged and tagged and returned after landing.
So, don't say they would confiscate things if they were dangerous, because they have done it in the past. These were, however, non-US flagged carriers, in a day and age when the flying customer was respected and treated better than a cow.
Exactly, the airlines want your complete attention during the most critical times in terms of flight safety.
That can't be the reason. For the most part, I'm completely unconscious during the first and last ten minutes of the flight, and for a good part of the time in-between. Asleep. I fall asleep as soon as everyone in my row is in their seats and I've buckled in. Sometimes I wake up for the actual takeoff roll. Sometimes not.
Not once has a flight attendant deliberately woken me up to listen to the spiel.
But come on folks, it's like 10 to 20 minutes per flight so is it such a hassle?
But Virtucon, it's my right to chat on the phone with my BFF and tell him or her all about the minutia of this flight and how the gate agent was rude to me and the guy next to me snores and there are no peanuts and no movie and the airline sucks and my life sucks because I have to travel all the time and whatever. It's called "freedom", and damn it, I don't care who else is involved.
Yeah, sure, from a EE perspective a microwatt level kindle is a big problem compared to a 100 kilowatt class TV transmitter.
100kW TV transmitters don't wander about the cockpit during a flight, they don't turn on suddenly during a descent. They are in well-known locations and the antennas are typically not in the instrument approach corridor for any airport.
When I flew out of Syracuse NY, there was a large FM station I'd pass over on the way south. It was always there, it was always a problem, and after the first time it screwed things up I knew what the cause was and that it would go away in a couple of minutes. None of that could be said about interference from a passenger's onboard device.
So if you want a chance in hell of operating flight instruments thru an "attack" by someone with a hand held radio transmitter,
Aircraft instruments aren't designed to operate through an attack by someone with a handheld transmitter. The cost would be too prohibitive, if it were even possible. There is no way to keep a handheld radio from blocking the single frequency being used for the glideslope signal on an ILS, from either inside or outside the plane. Ditto the VOR. Localizer. Voice. Data. Someone who wants to block those signals can do so easily.
What the rules are trying to stop is unintentional blocking of signals. Either way, intentional or unintentional, the system is still broken.
I would like to see a new procedure for flying replacing the FUD with a genuine interference FAA and TSA reported emergency light and procedure.
Huh? What are you trying to say?
So in the infinitely unlikely event someone intentionally or unintentionally caused a problem, they'd track it.
I'm sorry, but during the approach phase of a flight is NOT the time for the pilot to come out of the cockpit with a signal tracker looking for interference. Not even during the in-flight phase, since having to train crew to do that in addition to all the other things they are supposed to be doing is just silly. The simple solution is the best. Turn it off.
As for ground based interference, you can bet that it is tracked and people who do it are arrested. But in the the plane, with the limited amount of time and resources available, no, tracking it is not going to happen. As I recall, however, there have been cases of interference where the pilot has gotten on the intercom to remind people to turn things off, and the interference has gone away. No, I don't have a cite.
If your consumer electronic device isn't deliberately transmitting and is FCC Class B approved (i.e. has enough EM suppression that it can be sold in the US), it's not going to be a problem.
This is a canard. Your device may have passed Class B testing as an example or preproduction model made to perfect manufacturing standards that was sent to the lab, but the one you have in your hand has no clear guarantee that it would still pass Class B standards today.
Just one reason? The manufacturer is a cheap bastard who made a few copies with the original design, and then decided to cheap out on shielding or otherwise change the design in some way to save money. Who is going to notice that a device that has the same model number and same FCC id and looks the same on the outside wasn't manufactured to the same standards as the models that went to the testing lab?
And who is to say that the manufacturer didn't just lie?
Laptop "standards" are especially questionable, since they are deliberately tested with no peripherals attached (like that handy USB mouse you use instead of the touchpad, e.g.), and once you've opened up the laptop to add memory or replace a disk you can't say that it would pass testing at all.
You don't even know for sure that something hasn't broken in your device and it is radiating a huge amount. I was called in on an ELT search one Sunday morning to look for an ELT signal that nobody could pin down. It had no modulation, but the SARSATs were picking it up on every pass loud and clear. Long story short, it was a Toshiba television/DVD player combo in the apartment of a poor college student who was just trying to watch some PBS on a quiet Sunday morning. There was no external sign that the TV was radiating a massive signal on 121.5MHz, only the appearance of cops and CAP on his doorstep.
So no, the argument that "they've been tested" doesn't quite cover the reality of the situation.
I wear Bose over-the-ear noise cancelling headphones and have never been asked to take them off. I've been asked to turn them off, but never take them off.
You'd think they'd understand that with them in place but turned off, I hear almost nothing of the official announcements, a fact which I've conveyed to the flight crew with a reception similar to this.
It's not their call, it's the airline. Maybe some airlines do make people take them off, but none of the ones I've flown on have. I've simply taped over the little red light so they don't see it and they don't bother me. Other times I've simply worn some ear buds under the ear cups and plug into the system with them.
MP3 player blocks your ears, I actually can see how that makes sense.
Also, I think they ask you to put your books away, but don't give a shit.
There is no prohibition against reading a book at any time during taxi, takeoff, flight or landing. Nor is there a prohibition against having earbuds or headphones in place, only against the electronics being turned on.
In fact, if you have your headphones in place and plugged into the aircraft audio system, you are MORE likely to be able to hear the announcements than if you don't.
There's nothing special about the first 10 and last 10 minutes of a flight, other than it's the most likely time for a plane to crash land.
Well, you must be right. The last ten minutes of a flight will always have the highest incidence of crashes, since every flight that crashes has a last ten minutes. Except those that crash in the first ten.
But you're wrong in that the first and last ten minutes are not special. The first and last ten minutes of a normal flight are when the aircraft passes through the same airspace where all the VFR and IFR general aviation aircraft are, and are in the viscinity of an active airport where air traffic tends to congregate for some unknown reason. Getting above 10,000' means you've left most of the small private fleet behind, and once you hit 18,000' you're into IFR-only O2-carrying airspace (Class A), and that limits the amount of traffic even more. In bad weather, at either end of the flight, they need to concentrate on flying prescribed flight path so they don't run into anyone else, or into a big rock or whatever other hazard they need to avoid.
So you are actually wrong, the first and last ten are critical times in the flight profile, not just for those planes that are headed for a crash. That's why there is something called "sterile cockpit rules", where flight crews are prohibited from random chatter during important phases of the flight (like takeoff and landing).
In between, the workload is lighter and the pilots have a bit of time to deal with problems that crop up without them being a serious danger just by being a distraction. There is a common saying about flying, that a flight is "ten minutes of panic punctuated by hours of bordom in between." Or something like that.
The regulation is all about causing passengers to pay attention to flight attendants and nothing to do with avionics.
You are absurdly incorrect. The flight attendants don't need to include any instructions about electronic devices in order to need your attention to the briefing, it is a FEDERAL LAW that they give you that briefing and that it covers certain material. Those briefings aren't going to go away if the FAA and FCC change the rules about being able to use your cellphone during flight.
And in the third corner are those people who are so enamored of themselves that they think nothing is more important than their ability to play Angry Birds during takeoff, or their right to call someone to tell them "we're about to land so come pick me up."
I've heard the intereference from electronic devices while flying, so I know it happens. And I know the last place you want to be is on an airplane where the pilots are distracted trying to figure out why the ILS or MLS or comm radio isn't working anymore as they are making an approach to land. They don't always crash, but there are NTSB reports where the pilots have been distracted at important points in the flight and have crashed because of it. Being a deliberate distraction is just stupid.
And before you claim it doesn't happen, you'll have a hard time convincing me. I've BEEN the pilot trying to figure out why the comm radio won't communicate with New York Center during IFR conditions around thuderstorms. It was interference from an electronic device.
Watching, of course, are all the people who have inadvertently and intentionally left their electronics on
You can't inadvertently and intentionally leave your electronic device on. One or the other. If it is intentional, you're playing with other people's lives and you need to stop. Leaving your electronics on just to see if you crash or not is absurdly stupid. You don't want people putting you at needless risk, I am sure, so give other people the same courtesy.
It has been a while since I've been on a plane, but do cell phones make connections to towers during flight?
Of course. Why wouldn't they?
I've gotten off a flight and found messages on my phone that had arrived while I was at 30,000 feet somewhere over Idaho.
Unfortunately for cellphone users, the ban on cellphone use in flight is not an FAA ban, it is an FCC ban, and has nothing to do with passenger safety. It is entirely to do with the specific allocation of the frequencies in use as LAND MOBILE and not AIR MOBILE. The FAA won't be able to change that.
I already pay a Universal Connect Fee on my phone bill which subsidize the phone company to go into rural areas.
And to provide your poor neighbors in the big city with affordable telephone service. The USF isn't the sole fault of those awful people who live out on farms.
Never mind the fact that the AT&T was subsidized to put lines out there in the first place.
AT&T wasn't subsidized to put lines anywhere near the home I grew up in.
Especially since the Fee has been collected for over a decade and I see no real competition or expansion in rural connectivity since its inception.
What makes you think the fee was supposed to promote competition or expansion? It was supposed to provide affordable service, that's all. I have seen the effects. My parents, before the USF went in, had to pay several thousand dollars to get a line run to their house so they could get off the party line that was constantly busy or broken. It was their line and when it broke they paid to get it fixed. Now it's the telco's line and they come out to fix it for free. The 'demarc' truly is the demarc for my parents now, instead of a telco box a couple of miles away.
People who say yes to this are naive.
That's true. Or selfish. "I want my broadband paid for by other people".
The idea is likely that to maintain a free market in video delivery, you need the local government granted monopoly inet provider to provide "streaming compatible" speeds.
What "government granted monopoly inet provider"?
One exciting problem is TV/satellite is regulated at the federal FCC level yet monopoly cable is regulated pretty much only at the city level
1. There is no "monopoly cable".
2. The regulatory ability of cities and municipalities was taken away from them by the FCC a long time ago. I know. I used to be on the local "cable commission". It was disbanded because there was essentially nothing to do anymore. I'm currently dealing with the local franchise coordinator who can do absolutely nothing about Comcast's recent fraudulent offer of free equipment.
The only "regulation" a city has anymore is the franchise agreement, and that happens once every five or ten years, won't dare mess with a good revenue stream by trying to add unacceptable (to the cable co) terms, and would result in an insurrection of the populace if the existing cable company wasn't renewed and everyone had to give up their cable.
So, lets consider a scheme. Shut off over the air tv broadcasts as obsolete and sell the spectrum.
So you would take away from rural people the only free access to information they have and replace it with a broadband service that they have to pay for? You are so selfish in wanting YOUR streaming video that you'd force everyone else to have to pay to get theirs?
Don't laugh its already happened to UHF channels from "60-something? to channel 83.
Reallocating a portion of the UHF spectrum is hardly the same as "shut off over the air TV". A few channels moved into spaces that were open. Over the air TV remained functional. And you missed the even more recent conversion to digital, where a lot of VHF space was freed up by moving those channels to UHF. And even more recent plans by the FCC to move some other stations around to free up more space. But still, none of that is "shut off over the air TV". (But yes, the conversion to digital did mess up a lot of rural reception, but that wasn't the goal of the change.)
So to maintain "psuedo-competition" you need to be able to purchase streaming video over your broadband connection.
Ok, for the hyperpicky insignificant: a fuse should have an extremely low, reasonably constant resistance that will vary only slightly with temperature and not with current or voltage applied. Otherwise it isn't a fuse, it's something else. Thermistor, varistor, etc.
Any reasonably astute techincal person, when trying to replace a defective fuse, will ask two questions: what is the current rating and fast vs. slow blow. If he doesn't have one on hand, he may, in a pinch, replace the fuse with a piece of wire and, other than chancing a circuit meltdown (because fuses usually blow for a reason) might be able to get the circuit back online.
Nobody would ask "what is the resistance of your fuse at 100mA?" Nobody would wonder if the circuit needed a specific resistance (or capacitance or inductance) in that fuse. All three of those parameters should be parasitic at best. (That means small and irrelevant in design, sometimes relevant in practice.)
Voter Fraud if caught is a HUGE crime compared to the benefit a single individual gets from doing it.
That's right, because no fraudulent voter gets any significant benefit from doing it, except for the $10 or so they get paid by the organizer who busses them into the district.
The benefit goes to the winner of the election, and to the "community organizing group" (paid for by the party or the candidate) that has preloaded the system with a flood of bogus registrations for people who don't have the right to vote. Hint: it doesn't fall far from the tree.
Why is it that democrats scream about the massive voter fraud every time an election doesn't go the way they thought it should have, and then deny that there is any voter fraud when someone tries to implement a simple, reasonable law that tries to prevent it?
Requiring someone to prove they have the right to vote disenfranchises nobody -- who has the righ to vote. Only the ones who don't. And certainly not anywhere close to the scale of the attempts by Gore in Florida to have entire blocks of already counted votes thrown out for nonsensical reasons. You want to compain about disenfranchised voters? Look in the mirror, first.
If you place a 1 ohm resistor in parallel with F1 and F2, you can get the voltage drop and current higher -
My first reaction was that if you put a 1 ohm resistor in parallel with a fuse you should see NO CHANGE in the current, since a fuse has 0 ohms resistance.
Then I read the thing you linked to and found out that they aren't fuses, even though they've been called that. The voltage that comes out of a fuse isn't supposed to sag and cause operational issues, until you reach the current limit of the fuse and then it BLOWS. Zero output.
I hope the rest of the pi isn't as mislabeled as this.
This antenna tech is neat, but it's not going to make any differences. Mobile computing will stay terrestrial or Geosync. Having owned and used an iridium phone, you do not need a special tracking antenna to have phone service anywhere on the planet, what you need is for the craptastic satellites to be replaced with something that can handle more than 56K of bandwidth per connection.
There is a significant difference between using a pair of ten pound rotators to follow a satellite in a known orbit from a fixed loclation, and trying to follow a fixed satellite from a moving platform. One allows for pre-calculation of the aim; the other requires constant adjustment and fast reaction.
Part of the issue of the "craptastic" sattelites is that the bandwidth you can get over a radio link depends on the noise on that link. You might notice that the high-bandwidth connections use something larger than an Iridium phone antenna. And no, you can't just move the antenna up to the satellite end of the system because the more directional the antenna up there, the smaller the footprint it can cover.
We use self-aligning dishes to lock on to the sat, and they are a major pain in the ass. Any time there is a power inturruption, there is a good chance they lose their link.
We've got one of these for emergency communications in the county. It's a... let's be charitable and say "pain".
First, the elevation from around here to geosynchronous sats is right through the local treeline. And we have trees around here. Then you need to know that the firmware and sat data needs to be updated often, which requires someone to go out and fire up the sat dish about once a month.
They are cool, though. The first time I ever fired it up, it sat waiting for GPS lock. Once it had that, it poked its little head up and started sweeping the sky looking for the satellite. It got 1/4 of the way around and started fine tuning. Did I mention, it was pointing NORTH when it started fine adjustments? It did that for 15 minutes and then went back to home position, and did it again. Pointing NORTH. Did I mention, I'm in the northern hemisphere? As in, all the geosync sats are SOUTH from here.
Well, we had parked the sat dish next to a large metal pole building, and it was, of course, sensing the reflection off the wall. It wasn't smart enough to think, hmm, maybe since I can't get lock here I'm actually pointing the wrong way and I should seek a global maximum in signal and not the local maximum I've found. And apparently the controller doesn't have a built in compass (which just about every smartphone made today does, using a $5 chip) to know LOOK OVER THERE, MORON.
Not impressive.
What's even funnier is the next time we had it out for training. Someone flipped the circuit breaker by accident and the sat controller lost its configuration, which actually included information about how much current it was supposed to use to drive the motors to point the dish. Since the dish was UP at the time, and the controller would no longer send enough current to the motors to actually make them do anything, the dish could not be stowed. It had to be forced back so something close to down so it could be driven back to the barn overnight, and then 45 minutes the next day to the sat dish repairman. That was a hoot.
We got this because the local hospital chain got a bunch of them for their emergency comms. The hospital has since dumped them because they were such a pain to keep running.
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I can only imagine how he thought the manufacturers got it.
It's what's left over after they make Soylent Green. By-product.
"Nutritious fruit" isn't a particularly descriptive label,
And the question wasn't "can you describe a guava", it was "do you know what one is". "A fruit" is the correct answer, nutritious or not. The answer to the question that was asked is "yes".
if I had the idea the other person knew anything about gauvas my answer to the question "Do you know what a guava is?" would probably be "not really".
Do you judge your knowledge of something against what you think the other person knows all the time? Would you tell Mario Andretti, were he to ask you "do you know how to drive?" that "no, I don't"? Poor guy, if everyone did that, he'd never be able to use a cab or hire a limo.
Really I think I better questions would be "Is cloud computing related to weather?" and then we wouldn't be having this debate.
I'm still wondering why we're having this debate, because I'm wondering why a stupid poll intended to make "cloud" look more relevant and important and to sell "cloud services" to more IT people is worth discussing here. Worthless questions that don't say anything about anything, but can be spun to make Joe Average American look stupid by a techology based blog. That's the only "stuff that's important" I can see here.
And yes, after seeing it posted, I do know it is Prix.
Can you really think of a situation that would require you to trust any kind of clown?
Eating at McDonalds?
Should I say I know what it is or not?
Since you've just admitted that you know what it is, the honest answer would be 'yes'. Now, if the question was "do you know what it looks like?", you'd have to say "no".
You can ask someone if they know what a Pontiac Grand Pre is (it is a CAR), but they might have no idea how to pick one out of a used-car lot.
We know that 54% of people feel like they don't know what cloud computing is, we also know that 51% of people are so uniformed that they think cloud computing has something to do with weather.
No, we don't know that. The question was whether is was affected by the weather. A Pontiac Grand Pre doesn't have "something to do with the weather", but it certainly can be affected by the weather. (The gas milage of most cars is affected by the density of the air, and thus the weather. Icy roads will make driving a Pontiac Grand Pre harder.)
Okay, despite his confusion, at least he admitted he was ignorant about the subject. At least he didn't go and form a strong opinion and start arguing about a subject he knows nothing about.
And, from reading TFA, neither did those 51% who thought that weather would interfere with the cloud. They were asked about it and they answered. They weren't protesting on the streets demanding something be done about the weather to protect their access to the cloud.
You just can't have this many adult people who hate thinking, who embrace anti-intellectualism, and expect to remain prosperous.
So you think that people who don't know what the rather nebulous concept of "the cloud" (which is quite appropriate since "clouds" are already nebulous and consist of many different kinds) is "hate thinking" etc. etc.? Quite a leap, I'd say.
They do mean well but they tend to be childish, indulgent, and haven't the maturity to overcome their own thoughts and their own worries.
And people who rant about others who simply don't care about technical things are grown up, mature individuals who are fastidious? By the way, I think you want to call them "self-indulgent", because most people are indugent of others.
I am seriously wondering just how hard it is for an American to immigrate to a small Western European nation and become a naturalized citizen.
I sense that this statement is much like the random movie or TV star who tries to influence voting trends by claiming that "if X wins, I'm moving to England" or similar. It's not hard to move to Europe, but why you'd want to become a citizen there is a mystery. You'd just be stuck in the same kind of situation where you'd threaten to "move to the US" if politics didn't go the way you wanted.
Yes but in the second instance, the correct follow up would be, "Do you think birds are dinosaurs", and if a majority answered no, than the original implication of ignorance on a large part of America would be correct.
Birds are not dinosaurs, any more than humans are single cell protozoans. If you truly believe in macroevolution, of the kind that can create new species and animals from existing ones, then you must believe that things CHANGE over time. That is, they aren't the same anymore. You must answer "no" to that question if you are to be honest.
And if you don't believe in macroevolution, just microevolution (the kind that causes birds to develop different beaks to deal with different environments, but they are still birds), then you will still say "no".
And, of course, a creationist will say "no", as well.
Your question does nothing to differentiate between what you are obviously trying to imply about the ignorance or lack thereof of a person based on a belief or disbelief in evolution.
I would find lifting the ban for cameras and GPS receivers entirely sufficient.
Why do you need them? So you can take pictures of other people stuck in the same airplane with you while you are taking off and landing? You can use a camera during flight, why isn't that good enough?
And GPS? You know where you are -- stuck in a long round tin box somewhere between where you took off and where you landed. You aren't navigating so you don't need more information than that. You aren't going to go geocaching. You probably won't need a waypoint to find your way back to your seat from the loo. GPS receivers are radio equipment, and radio equipment has oscillators that can leak and interfere.
Yeah, it's cool that you could plot your course when you get home later, but hardly a "need".
Chrome has been doing them since, like, forever. I think it's fantastic, personally. I dont want the browser to nag me when it's time to update. Just do it...
You probably also don't have 100 computer semi-literates using Chrome for mission critical applications that will all call you at the same time when those mission critical apps stop working.
Automatic updates are fine for people who don't care if the program stops working for some unexplained reason, or who can either debug the problem themselves or put off finding a solution until they have some free time. Or for people who make a living off of debugging other people's computer problems.
Automatic updates are dangerous for high reliability systems, mission critical applications, or anything that is supposed to run unattended. Anyone who has worked in IT for any length of time will have memories of when some program decided to update itself and made itself fail. (E.g., "Firefox has detected that the following plugins are incompatible with the current version and disabled them:")
If they really were a threat to the flight safety, they would just confiscate it before departure, and give it back to you after landing.
One fine day I flew from Schipol to someplace in the US. As I was going through security in the land below sea level, they noticed I was carrying a shortwave radio. A simple device, really. About the size of a deck of cards, maybe a bit larger. Certainly not the boom-box sized thing that brought down the flight over Lockerbee, Scotland.
OMG, you can't take that on the airplane, they said. "I know about turning things off, and I won't be using it anyway while on board". OMG, you can't take that on the airplane. Give it to us, they said, we'll give it to the Captain and they'll give it back to you when you land.
Well, that was a better option than having to throw it away, so I relented.
During the flight I started to look through the In Flight Shopping catalog. As I flipped the pages, I came across -- a shortwave radio. For sale. On board. Give them money, they'll hand it to you. On board. Not the same model, but same concept. For just $60 US, anyone could be a successful terrorist and convert my flight into a flaming heap of twisted, sinking to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean metal.
I rang the call button. The fellow who came around turned out to be the purser. I held up the catalog and pointed. I was ready for a good argument and strong words. He said "oh, you must be Mr. Smith. Hold on a moment." He walked up to the front of the plane and came back with a yellow envelope with my name on it and handed it to me. Yes, my radio. I really could be trusted with such a nefarious device on board. He apologized for the overzealous security people and we both had a laugh.
Another flight, another country. I was carrying a bag full of tools, and had a Swiss army knife (official Victorinox) in my pocket. I put it in the bag to go through the x ray. The fellow at the xray asked me "do you have a Swiss army knife?" Why yes, I pulled it from the bag and showed it to him. No, you can't carry that on board. Give it to us, we'll give it to the pilot and you'll get it back at the end of the flight. Yes, that's what happened.
And exactly the same thing happened to the person I was travelling with as they followed me through. Her's was a smaller version, but still bagged and tagged and returned after landing.
So, don't say they would confiscate things if they were dangerous, because they have done it in the past. These were, however, non-US flagged carriers, in a day and age when the flying customer was respected and treated better than a cow.
Exactly, the airlines want your complete attention during the most critical times in terms of flight safety.
That can't be the reason. For the most part, I'm completely unconscious during the first and last ten minutes of the flight, and for a good part of the time in-between. Asleep. I fall asleep as soon as everyone in my row is in their seats and I've buckled in. Sometimes I wake up for the actual takeoff roll. Sometimes not.
Not once has a flight attendant deliberately woken me up to listen to the spiel.
But come on folks, it's like 10 to 20 minutes per flight so is it such a hassle?
But Virtucon, it's my right to chat on the phone with my BFF and tell him or her all about the minutia of this flight and how the gate agent was rude to me and the guy next to me snores and there are no peanuts and no movie and the airline sucks and my life sucks because I have to travel all the time and whatever. It's called "freedom", and damn it, I don't care who else is involved.
Yeah, sure, from a EE perspective a microwatt level kindle is a big problem compared to a 100 kilowatt class TV transmitter.
100kW TV transmitters don't wander about the cockpit during a flight, they don't turn on suddenly during a descent. They are in well-known locations and the antennas are typically not in the instrument approach corridor for any airport.
When I flew out of Syracuse NY, there was a large FM station I'd pass over on the way south. It was always there, it was always a problem, and after the first time it screwed things up I knew what the cause was and that it would go away in a couple of minutes. None of that could be said about interference from a passenger's onboard device.
So if you want a chance in hell of operating flight instruments thru an "attack" by someone with a hand held radio transmitter,
Aircraft instruments aren't designed to operate through an attack by someone with a handheld transmitter. The cost would be too prohibitive, if it were even possible. There is no way to keep a handheld radio from blocking the single frequency being used for the glideslope signal on an ILS, from either inside or outside the plane. Ditto the VOR. Localizer. Voice. Data. Someone who wants to block those signals can do so easily.
What the rules are trying to stop is unintentional blocking of signals. Either way, intentional or unintentional, the system is still broken.
I would like to see a new procedure for flying replacing the FUD with a genuine interference FAA and TSA reported emergency light and procedure.
Huh? What are you trying to say?
So in the infinitely unlikely event someone intentionally or unintentionally caused a problem, they'd track it.
I'm sorry, but during the approach phase of a flight is NOT the time for the pilot to come out of the cockpit with a signal tracker looking for interference. Not even during the in-flight phase, since having to train crew to do that in addition to all the other things they are supposed to be doing is just silly. The simple solution is the best. Turn it off.
As for ground based interference, you can bet that it is tracked and people who do it are arrested. But in the the plane, with the limited amount of time and resources available, no, tracking it is not going to happen. As I recall, however, there have been cases of interference where the pilot has gotten on the intercom to remind people to turn things off, and the interference has gone away. No, I don't have a cite.
If your consumer electronic device isn't deliberately transmitting and is FCC Class B approved (i.e. has enough EM suppression that it can be sold in the US), it's not going to be a problem.
This is a canard. Your device may have passed Class B testing as an example or preproduction model made to perfect manufacturing standards that was sent to the lab, but the one you have in your hand has no clear guarantee that it would still pass Class B standards today.
Just one reason? The manufacturer is a cheap bastard who made a few copies with the original design, and then decided to cheap out on shielding or otherwise change the design in some way to save money. Who is going to notice that a device that has the same model number and same FCC id and looks the same on the outside wasn't manufactured to the same standards as the models that went to the testing lab?
And who is to say that the manufacturer didn't just lie?
Laptop "standards" are especially questionable, since they are deliberately tested with no peripherals attached (like that handy USB mouse you use instead of the touchpad, e.g.), and once you've opened up the laptop to add memory or replace a disk you can't say that it would pass testing at all.
You don't even know for sure that something hasn't broken in your device and it is radiating a huge amount. I was called in on an ELT search one Sunday morning to look for an ELT signal that nobody could pin down. It had no modulation, but the SARSATs were picking it up on every pass loud and clear. Long story short, it was a Toshiba television/DVD player combo in the apartment of a poor college student who was just trying to watch some PBS on a quiet Sunday morning. There was no external sign that the TV was radiating a massive signal on 121.5MHz, only the appearance of cops and CAP on his doorstep.
So no, the argument that "they've been tested" doesn't quite cover the reality of the situation.
You'd think they'd understand that with them in place but turned off, I hear almost nothing of the official announcements, a fact which I've conveyed to the flight crew with a reception similar to this.
It's not their call, it's the airline. Maybe some airlines do make people take them off, but none of the ones I've flown on have. I've simply taped over the little red light so they don't see it and they don't bother me. Other times I've simply worn some ear buds under the ear cups and plug into the system with them.
MP3 player blocks your ears, I actually can see how that makes sense. Also, I think they ask you to put your books away, but don't give a shit.
There is no prohibition against reading a book at any time during taxi, takeoff, flight or landing. Nor is there a prohibition against having earbuds or headphones in place, only against the electronics being turned on.
In fact, if you have your headphones in place and plugged into the aircraft audio system, you are MORE likely to be able to hear the announcements than if you don't.
There's nothing special about the first 10 and last 10 minutes of a flight, other than it's the most likely time for a plane to crash land.
Well, you must be right. The last ten minutes of a flight will always have the highest incidence of crashes, since every flight that crashes has a last ten minutes. Except those that crash in the first ten.
But you're wrong in that the first and last ten minutes are not special. The first and last ten minutes of a normal flight are when the aircraft passes through the same airspace where all the VFR and IFR general aviation aircraft are, and are in the viscinity of an active airport where air traffic tends to congregate for some unknown reason. Getting above 10,000' means you've left most of the small private fleet behind, and once you hit 18,000' you're into IFR-only O2-carrying airspace (Class A), and that limits the amount of traffic even more. In bad weather, at either end of the flight, they need to concentrate on flying prescribed flight path so they don't run into anyone else, or into a big rock or whatever other hazard they need to avoid.
So you are actually wrong, the first and last ten are critical times in the flight profile, not just for those planes that are headed for a crash. That's why there is something called "sterile cockpit rules", where flight crews are prohibited from random chatter during important phases of the flight (like takeoff and landing).
In between, the workload is lighter and the pilots have a bit of time to deal with problems that crop up without them being a serious danger just by being a distraction. There is a common saying about flying, that a flight is "ten minutes of panic punctuated by hours of bordom in between." Or something like that.
The regulation is all about causing passengers to pay attention to flight attendants and nothing to do with avionics.
You are absurdly incorrect. The flight attendants don't need to include any instructions about electronic devices in order to need your attention to the briefing, it is a FEDERAL LAW that they give you that briefing and that it covers certain material. Those briefings aren't going to go away if the FAA and FCC change the rules about being able to use your cellphone during flight.
In the other corner,
And in the third corner are those people who are so enamored of themselves that they think nothing is more important than their ability to play Angry Birds during takeoff, or their right to call someone to tell them "we're about to land so come pick me up."
I've heard the intereference from electronic devices while flying, so I know it happens. And I know the last place you want to be is on an airplane where the pilots are distracted trying to figure out why the ILS or MLS or comm radio isn't working anymore as they are making an approach to land. They don't always crash, but there are NTSB reports where the pilots have been distracted at important points in the flight and have crashed because of it. Being a deliberate distraction is just stupid.
And before you claim it doesn't happen, you'll have a hard time convincing me. I've BEEN the pilot trying to figure out why the comm radio won't communicate with New York Center during IFR conditions around thuderstorms. It was interference from an electronic device.
Watching, of course, are all the people who have inadvertently and intentionally left their electronics on
You can't inadvertently and intentionally leave your electronic device on. One or the other. If it is intentional, you're playing with other people's lives and you need to stop. Leaving your electronics on just to see if you crash or not is absurdly stupid. You don't want people putting you at needless risk, I am sure, so give other people the same courtesy.
It has been a while since I've been on a plane, but do cell phones make connections to towers during flight?
Of course. Why wouldn't they?
I've gotten off a flight and found messages on my phone that had arrived while I was at 30,000 feet somewhere over Idaho.
Unfortunately for cellphone users, the ban on cellphone use in flight is not an FAA ban, it is an FCC ban, and has nothing to do with passenger safety. It is entirely to do with the specific allocation of the frequencies in use as LAND MOBILE and not AIR MOBILE. The FAA won't be able to change that.
I already pay a Universal Connect Fee on my phone bill which subsidize the phone company to go into rural areas.
And to provide your poor neighbors in the big city with affordable telephone service. The USF isn't the sole fault of those awful people who live out on farms.
Never mind the fact that the AT&T was subsidized to put lines out there in the first place.
AT&T wasn't subsidized to put lines anywhere near the home I grew up in.
Especially since the Fee has been collected for over a decade and I see no real competition or expansion in rural connectivity since its inception.
What makes you think the fee was supposed to promote competition or expansion? It was supposed to provide affordable service, that's all. I have seen the effects. My parents, before the USF went in, had to pay several thousand dollars to get a line run to their house so they could get off the party line that was constantly busy or broken. It was their line and when it broke they paid to get it fixed. Now it's the telco's line and they come out to fix it for free. The 'demarc' truly is the demarc for my parents now, instead of a telco box a couple of miles away.
People who say yes to this are naive.
That's true. Or selfish. "I want my broadband paid for by other people".
The idea is likely that to maintain a free market in video delivery, you need the local government granted monopoly inet provider to provide "streaming compatible" speeds.
What "government granted monopoly inet provider"?
One exciting problem is TV/satellite is regulated at the federal FCC level yet monopoly cable is regulated pretty much only at the city level
1. There is no "monopoly cable".
2. The regulatory ability of cities and municipalities was taken away from them by the FCC a long time ago. I know. I used to be on the local "cable commission". It was disbanded because there was essentially nothing to do anymore. I'm currently dealing with the local franchise coordinator who can do absolutely nothing about Comcast's recent fraudulent offer of free equipment.
The only "regulation" a city has anymore is the franchise agreement, and that happens once every five or ten years, won't dare mess with a good revenue stream by trying to add unacceptable (to the cable co) terms, and would result in an insurrection of the populace if the existing cable company wasn't renewed and everyone had to give up their cable.
So, lets consider a scheme. Shut off over the air tv broadcasts as obsolete and sell the spectrum.
So you would take away from rural people the only free access to information they have and replace it with a broadband service that they have to pay for? You are so selfish in wanting YOUR streaming video that you'd force everyone else to have to pay to get theirs?
Don't laugh its already happened to UHF channels from "60-something? to channel 83.
Reallocating a portion of the UHF spectrum is hardly the same as "shut off over the air TV". A few channels moved into spaces that were open. Over the air TV remained functional. And you missed the even more recent conversion to digital, where a lot of VHF space was freed up by moving those channels to UHF. And even more recent plans by the FCC to move some other stations around to free up more space. But still, none of that is "shut off over the air TV". (But yes, the conversion to digital did mess up a lot of rural reception, but that wasn't the goal of the change.)
So to maintain "psuedo-competition" you need to be able to purchase streaming video over your broadband connection.
Instead of being able to get it for free OTA?
Ok, for the hyperpicky insignificant: a fuse should have an extremely low, reasonably constant resistance that will vary only slightly with temperature and not with current or voltage applied. Otherwise it isn't a fuse, it's something else. Thermistor, varistor, etc.
Any reasonably astute techincal person, when trying to replace a defective fuse, will ask two questions: what is the current rating and fast vs. slow blow. If he doesn't have one on hand, he may, in a pinch, replace the fuse with a piece of wire and, other than chancing a circuit meltdown (because fuses usually blow for a reason) might be able to get the circuit back online.
Nobody would ask "what is the resistance of your fuse at 100mA?" Nobody would wonder if the circuit needed a specific resistance (or capacitance or inductance) in that fuse. All three of those parameters should be parasitic at best. (That means small and irrelevant in design, sometimes relevant in practice.)
Voter Fraud if caught is a HUGE crime compared to the benefit a single individual gets from doing it.
That's right, because no fraudulent voter gets any significant benefit from doing it, except for the $10 or so they get paid by the organizer who busses them into the district. The benefit goes to the winner of the election, and to the "community organizing group" (paid for by the party or the candidate) that has preloaded the system with a flood of bogus registrations for people who don't have the right to vote. Hint: it doesn't fall far from the tree.
Why is it that democrats scream about the massive voter fraud every time an election doesn't go the way they thought it should have, and then deny that there is any voter fraud when someone tries to implement a simple, reasonable law that tries to prevent it?
Requiring someone to prove they have the right to vote disenfranchises nobody -- who has the righ to vote. Only the ones who don't. And certainly not anywhere close to the scale of the attempts by Gore in Florida to have entire blocks of already counted votes thrown out for nonsensical reasons. You want to compain about disenfranchised voters? Look in the mirror, first.
If you place a 1 ohm resistor in parallel with F1 and F2, you can get the voltage drop and current higher -
My first reaction was that if you put a 1 ohm resistor in parallel with a fuse you should see NO CHANGE in the current, since a fuse has 0 ohms resistance.
Then I read the thing you linked to and found out that they aren't fuses, even though they've been called that. The voltage that comes out of a fuse isn't supposed to sag and cause operational issues, until you reach the current limit of the fuse and then it BLOWS. Zero output.
I hope the rest of the pi isn't as mislabeled as this.
This antenna tech is neat, but it's not going to make any differences. Mobile computing will stay terrestrial or Geosync. Having owned and used an iridium phone, you do not need a special tracking antenna to have phone service anywhere on the planet, what you need is for the craptastic satellites to be replaced with something that can handle more than 56K of bandwidth per connection.
There is a significant difference between using a pair of ten pound rotators to follow a satellite in a known orbit from a fixed loclation, and trying to follow a fixed satellite from a moving platform. One allows for pre-calculation of the aim; the other requires constant adjustment and fast reaction.
Part of the issue of the "craptastic" sattelites is that the bandwidth you can get over a radio link depends on the noise on that link. You might notice that the high-bandwidth connections use something larger than an Iridium phone antenna. And no, you can't just move the antenna up to the satellite end of the system because the more directional the antenna up there, the smaller the footprint it can cover.
We use self-aligning dishes to lock on to the sat, and they are a major pain in the ass. Any time there is a power inturruption, there is a good chance they lose their link.
We've got one of these for emergency communications in the county. It's a ... let's be charitable and say "pain".
First, the elevation from around here to geosynchronous sats is right through the local treeline. And we have trees around here. Then you need to know that the firmware and sat data needs to be updated often, which requires someone to go out and fire up the sat dish about once a month.
They are cool, though. The first time I ever fired it up, it sat waiting for GPS lock. Once it had that, it poked its little head up and started sweeping the sky looking for the satellite. It got 1/4 of the way around and started fine tuning. Did I mention, it was pointing NORTH when it started fine adjustments? It did that for 15 minutes and then went back to home position, and did it again. Pointing NORTH. Did I mention, I'm in the northern hemisphere? As in, all the geosync sats are SOUTH from here.
Well, we had parked the sat dish next to a large metal pole building, and it was, of course, sensing the reflection off the wall. It wasn't smart enough to think, hmm, maybe since I can't get lock here I'm actually pointing the wrong way and I should seek a global maximum in signal and not the local maximum I've found. And apparently the controller doesn't have a built in compass (which just about every smartphone made today does, using a $5 chip) to know LOOK OVER THERE, MORON.
Not impressive.
What's even funnier is the next time we had it out for training. Someone flipped the circuit breaker by accident and the sat controller lost its configuration, which actually included information about how much current it was supposed to use to drive the motors to point the dish. Since the dish was UP at the time, and the controller would no longer send enough current to the motors to actually make them do anything, the dish could not be stowed. It had to be forced back so something close to down so it could be driven back to the barn overnight, and then 45 minutes the next day to the sat dish repairman. That was a hoot.
We got this because the local hospital chain got a bunch of them for their emergency comms. The hospital has since dumped them because they were such a pain to keep running.