I mostly agree with you. However, silencing prejudiced opinion might reduce prejudice. I say this because I think most of us have prejudices which we keep in check, because we know they're irrational and wrong.
Your two sentences are contradictory. "Keeping them in check" is not reducing the prejudice, it is simply constraining it. Keeping it bottled up. Festering is another way to say it.
Or, better put, being intolerant of intolerance is intolerance exemplified. You cannot fight against that in which you are actively engaged. It is also called "hypocrisy", since everyone is intolerant of something.
I still feel uncomfortable about gagging people; I'd prefer to keep them quiet by ridiculing them.
Why yes, ridicule works so well in dealing with prejudice and bigotry. Avoid education and reasonable discourse at all costs.
Put pressure on those who have opinions you disagree with so they will not express them and allow you a chance to discuss those opinions openly and frankly. Or even to know WHO you need to discuss them with because everyone avoids speaking to you about them. Good idea.
I for one, welcome our Futurama renewing studio execs...
*ducks*
Now I admit, I haven't watched much of the newer Futuramas, but I don't recall that ducks played any significant roll in that program. Popplers, yes. But ducks?
Or was it a reference somehow relating ducks and foxes -- for Fox studio execs? Do foxes eat lots of ducks, and you are wishing the Fox execs a happy dinner? Yes?! Did I guess it right?
What I do care about, however, is the existence of right-wing, religious,homophobic nutters...
None of whom go out of existence because this app is banned. Banning this app does nothing to make them go away.
... and that drugging and violent electroshocks are the way to go about it.
Now, I have to admit that I don't own an iPhone, but I do hear that it can do wonderful and amazing things. Giving people drugs and violent electroshocks, however, I just don't believe. Banning this app will do nothing to limit drugging and violent electroshocks.
Those are exactly the nutters who get their sick, distorted world-view reinforced by this kind of app,...
No, those are exactly the nutters who see this banning of an app as another sign that the world is going to hell and that they need to do something to stop it before it happens. So, in fact, it is banning this app that is getting it the most publicity, and giving "those nutters" a sicker, more distorted world-view.
So, yes, I do want this app banned. What I do in my bedroom has no impact on them whatsoever; but what they would do to me to "cure" me is harmful to the extreme.
No, that app is not harmful to you in the extreme. Your argument is like saying that those sicko white supremisists in Idaho eat spam on white bread, so let's ban spam and white bread.
The premise of the first amendment (yes, I know, it doesn't apply here, but the premise does) is that knowing what people are saying what allows you to identify problems and act to educate them away. Quashing speech does not make the underlying feelings go away, it makes them stronger ("those damn queers are censoring US!") and drives them underground. What you do is create an atmosphere of increased hate because not only of what you are but for the rights they see you trying to take away from them.
It's like poking a beehive with a stick. You hope the bees will simply go away; the bees see you as a threat and try to make YOU go away. Nobody wins.
Ironically, everything he's doing is completely legal in the US.
Really? The basic concept of US freedom to listen to anything includes a prohibition on conveying what you hear to third parties. If he's just listening, he's probably ok, but by tweeting what he hears he's not. The US transmissions certainly do not fall into the broadcast exclusion for third party communications.
Besides really really senile old people, who was bitching about how much better Ma Bell was? I call straw man.
For all the positives that took place from the Ma Bell breakup, there is still one big downside.
When something doesn't work, who are you gonna call? Ghostbusters?
Have you ever had the fun of trying to get a long distance connection problem fixed? I have. Local carrier blames LD company. LD company blames local carrier. Nobody fixes nothing. When it was "MaBell", you called the operator, she passed you onto the right department, it got fixed.
That applied to your phone service as a whole. Phone not work? Call repair. None of this "if we find the problem is inside the demarc we'll charge you a buttload for coming out.." The phone and all the wiring from it to the world belonged to Ma Bell, and Ma Bell was responsible for fixing it.
For non-technical people doing simple things, Ma Bell was just fine. Breaking the company up meant more people to deal with to get the same job done, and more confusion about who did what and at what price.
Did anyone else just finish reading the story about the Dutch guy tweeting aircraft data for the attacks on Libya and assume that this story was about Qadafi's response?
Well, when a nation seeks to oust its leader and the leader responds with crimes against humanity, we are honor-bound to defend those civilians under attack by their own leadership.
Does this honor-binding apply to all revolutionaries attempting to overthrow the existing civil government, or only those whose actions you agree with? One man's revolutionary is another man's freedom fighter, so to speak. Would you feel honor-bound to defend, e.g., Timothy McVeigh had he made it to a remote hide-away and ATF and FBI were conducting a full-scale assault to capture him? What about one of the militias in Idaho if they start trying to "oust [their nation's] leader"? Would you have moved to South Carolina to help the Confederates "oust [their] leader"?
but this latest involvement is extremely unpopular with the majority of people in the US.
I recognize the fact that the majority of the US are mindless.
Such insults are usually levied against those who supported the UN sanctions and US participation in Iraq. It is refreshing to see them applied to those who knee-jerk oppose all military action anywhere.
In any case, your claim requires citation. When did we vote and measure the popularity?
But even in this case, the mindless aren't fully in support of the current actions.
Yep, that's how the insult is usually applied.
You have to face it. The same man who promised he'd get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan and close Gitmo "on day one" of his administration is now getting us involved in yet ANOTHER war trying to depose the leader of yet another sovereign country.
Which ultimately begs the question as to why ALL aircraft transmissions (civilian or otherwise) aren't encrypted.
Don't get me wrong, I'm kind of glad they aren't for cool hacking tricks like this, but seriously, kind of makes you wonder...I mean we're only talking about a few hundred tons of metal flying through the air with thousands of gallons of jet fuel. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, you just explained why they aren't. Simple analog AM communications are about as simple as it gets, and still radios fail. Imagine making them all digital encrypted.
The other obvious reason is, why bother? If all aircraft signals are encrypted, then everyone would have access to the keys and the radios to listen. What do you accomplish by encrypting? Who do you stop from listening? Only Mom and Pop who have a casual interest in the chatter. The guys who would use the data for harm (like tweeting the positions and data about incoming airstrikes) would buy an encrypted radio and listen in just like now.
Those that do have new TV's, the main thing that they seem to like is the "clear" picture, which is provided by the change to digital transmissions - not HD.
Unless you happen to live in what used to be the acceptable edge of the contour and could get a viewable analog signal, which means you now get nothing, or worse, a signal that blocks up and stops every ten seconds.
The only people who are getting the "clear" picture are those who already lived within a good signal range and had some other reason for bad analog. E.g., bad antenna cable that they replaced when putting up the new digital antenna. Or they gave up on an internal antenna and actually installed an outside one, which would have cleared up their analog signal, too.
Even myself, if I'm watching an SD signal that was meant for a 4:3 set then it's annoying. I get either a stretched picture or worse - letterboxing meant for 4:3 which REALLY compresses things.
I had to replace my old 4:3 set with a new HD one, and I've begun to notice one thing. Well, one thing amongst many: many broadcasters are sending their 4:3 SD images IN LETTERBOX, apparently assuming those who watch in SD won't care the picture is smaller and those who have HD watching the SD signal have zoomed the SD image to HD size. (Not stretched, but magnified both directions).
So, because I don't zoom SD to full size, I get the wonderful combination that my HD screen is smaller than my old CRT (an HD screen of the same width as my old CRT is about 12" less tall) and the picture they re sending is smaller to begin with. Marvelous.
In my experience of looking for free reading material for my ebook reader, yes, for modern works, price is a good indicator of the chance of quality. Not a direct relationship, but I've found most of the time that the "free" ebooks from current authors are not worth the time and effort of downloading them.
Not always, but most of the time. Removing the barrier to publishing a quality book means more crap gets published.
I'm already suspicious of the quality of the book being talked about here, since the author of the book is an alleged IT professional and the link he provides to the book website is wrong. He's got ubuntupocketguide.org, it's really a.com.
And that's why I used the scare quotes around the word, to indicate that it didn't really mean what the word really means. Some things that people call science today really aren't, and that applies to more than intelligent design. Pretty much all "science" that deals with the origin of life is scare-quote "science".
Science cannot be dogma. Dogma is the opposite of science.
You seem quite confused about this topic.
I would charge that those who have accepted dogma as science are the confused ones, but you are free to have your own opinion. Yes, true science doesn't have dogma; but that only shows that everything that is called science today really isn't.
And no, I'm not confused at all, but your insult was a nice attempt at confusing the discussion.
That's only if you don't understand what hate-crimes legislation is intended to accomplish.
Yes, I understand what it is intended to accomplish.
Not just any crime against a gay person is a hate crime.
Well, that's how it is supposed to work, in theory.
If you beat a gay man because he's gay,
The tacit assumption when any straight beats any gay.
To suggest that they are a form of discrimination against bigoted criminals is ridiculous.
Well, you are the only one claiming it is discrimination against "bigoted criminals"'; I think most people who talk about such legislation see it as discrimination against law-abiding straights. As in, "a crime against a gay seems to be more serious than a crime against a straight, yet we are all supposed to be equal."
In any case, I think that was the point I was making in regard to the comment from the OP. Calling a law that protects scientists studying one thing discrimination against all other scientists is ridiculous, just like calling a law that protects gays discrimination against everyone else has been branded ridiculous. You just made my point for me.
actually, this bill is discrimination against every other religion that's out there.
This argument doesn't get very far when it is made regarding laws regarding sexual orientation, so I don't think you want to make it here.
A law against "discrimination of all religions" is different than a law against discrimination of a single religion.
As is a law against discrimination because someone is gay. Or a law that says a crime against a gay person is a "hate crime" and thus must be punished more than the same crime committed against anyone else.
You know that applies to a lot of "science" that is dogma today, don't you? I don't think you intended to be as inclusive in that statement as it really is, that's why I'm asking.
I take offense at your threat to sue, and am discussing a countersuit with my attorney right now. I clean up well and juries like me. I will sue you in Texas and ask for millions in damages. You will lose. Cut your losses now and just send me a $10 note and we'll call it good.
... but he was "Tried in the public courts" as they say.
I think the actual saying is "tried in the court of public opinion". The courts we have around here are all "public courts", at least the legal ones. The tennis courts are private, however...
However, any university wishing to appear credible is *not* going to have someone studying mortgage failures that was implicated in even a tangential way with an actual mortgage fraud. "Avoid even the illusion of impropriety."
And yet, a lot of people who read this blog, being of a technical bent, will say that the best employment for a black hat is as a white hat because he knows the subject pretty well. Why would this be any different? And since there were no legal sanctions, exactly what legal grounds does the Uni have for firing him? Something to do with "innocent until proven guilty".
Is implication supposed to be good enough for a government to treat someone like they are guilty now?
If you want to make a boast about how fast it is, do it like they used to do with modems: give us an actual numeric speed (e.g. 1200bps, 19.2kbps).
You mean like the 56k modems that couldn't legally do 56k, they were capped at 53.something? Or the 56k modems that wouldn't achieve even 53.something unless you were on a pristine copper pair 30 feet from the central office? You mean honesty like that?
Or honesty like Qwest, who advertises all their speeds for DSL in 'megs'. Forty smeggin' megs of what? Bits? Bytes? Bauds?
They had a complete air traffic control system set up in that church. Not just "a computer".
Oh, excuse me. That means it was quite feasible for them to simply grab an icon on a computer screen and move the ILS transmitters underground by 200 feet so the airliner would fly into the ground... NOT.
To move an ILS like that would require physically moving the transmitting antennas -- both the upper and lower beam -- to the point where you wanted the airliner to hit the ground. Not only that, but simply moving the antennas would do nothing to the aircraft altimeters -- either the barometric based one or the radar altimeter. The airplane gets to DH (decision height), which is still at least 200 feet above ground, and the pilots initiate a go-around. At worst, you get the wrong barometric pressure data into the airplane and the PNF (pilot not flying) says "hey, our radar altimeter and BP altimeter don't agree, something's wrong, let's go around...". Even if they didn't agree, vertical guidance is coming from the ILS and the worst-case altimeter defines the DH point. You still wouldn't fly into the ground, as long as you are correctly flying the ILS approach.
But simply clicking on an icon and dragging it into the ground with the plane happily following it? Horse manure, whether you are hacking into ATC or sitting at the real console itself.
She plugged her laptop into the cockpit and was able to pilot the plane again, saving all on board.
Sorta like the bad guys in one of the Die Hard movies that used their computer to hack into the air traffic control system and "move the ILS down" so the incoming airliner would crash.
...but you've got to wonder how much warning did they get.
If you read the article you linked to, you'd see:
"In places relatively far from the seismic center, people can receive the warning up to half a minute or so before the quake reaches those areas."
Far from the center, "up to half a minute". Close to the center, I'm betting less than 30 seconds. About enough time to pull your cellphone out and read the SMS text telling you that you are about to die. Enough time to almost stop the train, but not enough to move it out of harm's way.
In comparison the response in the US to Katrina seemed flat footed, as if they were caught off-guard in the aftermath of the storm and didn't quite know who was in charge.
No, everybody but one person knew who was in charge. That would be the Governor of Louisiana, who was incapable of uttering the one simple sentence that would have authorized the federal government to come to her aide: "help!".
That's the way the organization of states is set up. It has something to do with that one pesky amendment to the constitution that says something about "all powers not listed herein are reserved to the states or the citizens..." Other countries don't have this "delay" because their federal governments don't have the constitutional limits ours does.
Federal aide as idle because, by law, the feds couldn't take over a state disaster until the governor acted. She knew what was coming, it wasn't a big surprise when the hurricane that had been tracked by satellite showed up. By then it was too late. Now, usually, the governors are pro-active on this kind of thing and actually ask before it becomes a catastrophe, but... to blame the US as a whole for the failure of one governor to act appropriately is a bit much.
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I mostly agree with you. However, silencing prejudiced opinion might reduce prejudice. I say this because I think most of us have prejudices which we keep in check, because we know they're irrational and wrong.
Your two sentences are contradictory. "Keeping them in check" is not reducing the prejudice, it is simply constraining it. Keeping it bottled up. Festering is another way to say it.
Or, better put, being intolerant of intolerance is intolerance exemplified. You cannot fight against that in which you are actively engaged. It is also called "hypocrisy", since everyone is intolerant of something.
I still feel uncomfortable about gagging people; I'd prefer to keep them quiet by ridiculing them.
Why yes, ridicule works so well in dealing with prejudice and bigotry. Avoid education and reasonable discourse at all costs. Put pressure on those who have opinions you disagree with so they will not express them and allow you a chance to discuss those opinions openly and frankly. Or even to know WHO you need to discuss them with because everyone avoids speaking to you about them. Good idea.
I for one, welcome our Futurama renewing studio execs... *ducks*
Now I admit, I haven't watched much of the newer Futuramas, but I don't recall that ducks played any significant roll in that program. Popplers, yes. But ducks?
Or was it a reference somehow relating ducks and foxes -- for Fox studio execs? Do foxes eat lots of ducks, and you are wishing the Fox execs a happy dinner? Yes?! Did I guess it right?
What I do care about, however, is the existence of right-wing, religious,homophobic nutters ...
None of whom go out of existence because this app is banned. Banning this app does nothing to make them go away.
... and that drugging and violent electroshocks are the way to go about it.
Now, I have to admit that I don't own an iPhone, but I do hear that it can do wonderful and amazing things. Giving people drugs and violent electroshocks, however, I just don't believe. Banning this app will do nothing to limit drugging and violent electroshocks.
Those are exactly the nutters who get their sick, distorted world-view reinforced by this kind of app,...
No, those are exactly the nutters who see this banning of an app as another sign that the world is going to hell and that they need to do something to stop it before it happens. So, in fact, it is banning this app that is getting it the most publicity, and giving "those nutters" a sicker, more distorted world-view.
So, yes, I do want this app banned. What I do in my bedroom has no impact on them whatsoever; but what they would do to me to "cure" me is harmful to the extreme.
No, that app is not harmful to you in the extreme. Your argument is like saying that those sicko white supremisists in Idaho eat spam on white bread, so let's ban spam and white bread.
The premise of the first amendment (yes, I know, it doesn't apply here, but the premise does) is that knowing what people are saying what allows you to identify problems and act to educate them away. Quashing speech does not make the underlying feelings go away, it makes them stronger ("those damn queers are censoring US!") and drives them underground. What you do is create an atmosphere of increased hate because not only of what you are but for the rights they see you trying to take away from them.
It's like poking a beehive with a stick. You hope the bees will simply go away; the bees see you as a threat and try to make YOU go away. Nobody wins.
Except they weren't right then.
Ironically, everything he's doing is completely legal in the US.
Really? The basic concept of US freedom to listen to anything includes a prohibition on conveying what you hear to third parties. If he's just listening, he's probably ok, but by tweeting what he hears he's not. The US transmissions certainly do not fall into the broadcast exclusion for third party communications.
As I recall, Charlie Ergen has been hot for DirectTV for a very long time, and has already tried to buy them out. The FCC stopped it back in 2002.
Besides really really senile old people, who was bitching about how much better Ma Bell was? I call straw man.
For all the positives that took place from the Ma Bell breakup, there is still one big downside. When something doesn't work, who are you gonna call? Ghostbusters?
Have you ever had the fun of trying to get a long distance connection problem fixed? I have. Local carrier blames LD company. LD company blames local carrier. Nobody fixes nothing. When it was "MaBell", you called the operator, she passed you onto the right department, it got fixed.
That applied to your phone service as a whole. Phone not work? Call repair. None of this "if we find the problem is inside the demarc we'll charge you a buttload for coming out.." The phone and all the wiring from it to the world belonged to Ma Bell, and Ma Bell was responsible for fixing it.
For non-technical people doing simple things, Ma Bell was just fine. Breaking the company up meant more people to deal with to get the same job done, and more confusion about who did what and at what price.
Did anyone else just finish reading the story about the Dutch guy tweeting aircraft data for the attacks on Libya and assume that this story was about Qadafi's response?
Well, when a nation seeks to oust its leader and the leader responds with crimes against humanity, we are honor-bound to defend those civilians under attack by their own leadership.
Does this honor-binding apply to all revolutionaries attempting to overthrow the existing civil government, or only those whose actions you agree with? One man's revolutionary is another man's freedom fighter, so to speak. Would you feel honor-bound to defend, e.g., Timothy McVeigh had he made it to a remote hide-away and ATF and FBI were conducting a full-scale assault to capture him? What about one of the militias in Idaho if they start trying to "oust [their nation's] leader"? Would you have moved to South Carolina to help the Confederates "oust [their] leader"?
but this latest involvement is extremely unpopular with the majority of people in the US.
I recognize the fact that the majority of the US are mindless.
Such insults are usually levied against those who supported the UN sanctions and US participation in Iraq. It is refreshing to see them applied to those who knee-jerk oppose all military action anywhere.
In any case, your claim requires citation. When did we vote and measure the popularity?
But even in this case, the mindless aren't fully in support of the current actions.
Yep, that's how the insult is usually applied.
You have to face it. The same man who promised he'd get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan and close Gitmo "on day one" of his administration is now getting us involved in yet ANOTHER war trying to depose the leader of yet another sovereign country.
Which ultimately begs the question as to why ALL aircraft transmissions (civilian or otherwise) aren't encrypted. Don't get me wrong, I'm kind of glad they aren't for cool hacking tricks like this, but seriously, kind of makes you wonder...I mean we're only talking about a few hundred tons of metal flying through the air with thousands of gallons of jet fuel. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, you just explained why they aren't. Simple analog AM communications are about as simple as it gets, and still radios fail. Imagine making them all digital encrypted.
The other obvious reason is, why bother? If all aircraft signals are encrypted, then everyone would have access to the keys and the radios to listen. What do you accomplish by encrypting? Who do you stop from listening? Only Mom and Pop who have a casual interest in the chatter. The guys who would use the data for harm (like tweeting the positions and data about incoming airstrikes) would buy an encrypted radio and listen in just like now.
Those that do have new TV's, the main thing that they seem to like is the "clear" picture, which is provided by the change to digital transmissions - not HD.
Unless you happen to live in what used to be the acceptable edge of the contour and could get a viewable analog signal, which means you now get nothing, or worse, a signal that blocks up and stops every ten seconds.
The only people who are getting the "clear" picture are those who already lived within a good signal range and had some other reason for bad analog. E.g., bad antenna cable that they replaced when putting up the new digital antenna. Or they gave up on an internal antenna and actually installed an outside one, which would have cleared up their analog signal, too.
Even myself, if I'm watching an SD signal that was meant for a 4:3 set then it's annoying. I get either a stretched picture or worse - letterboxing meant for 4:3 which REALLY compresses things.
I had to replace my old 4:3 set with a new HD one, and I've begun to notice one thing. Well, one thing amongst many: many broadcasters are sending their 4:3 SD images IN LETTERBOX, apparently assuming those who watch in SD won't care the picture is smaller and those who have HD watching the SD signal have zoomed the SD image to HD size. (Not stretched, but magnified both directions).
So, because I don't zoom SD to full size, I get the wonderful combination that my HD screen is smaller than my old CRT (an HD screen of the same width as my old CRT is about 12" less tall) and the picture they re sending is smaller to begin with. Marvelous.
Quality = Price, in you mind?
In my experience of looking for free reading material for my ebook reader, yes, for modern works, price is a good indicator of the chance of quality. Not a direct relationship, but I've found most of the time that the "free" ebooks from current authors are not worth the time and effort of downloading them.
Not always, but most of the time. Removing the barrier to publishing a quality book means more crap gets published.
I'm already suspicious of the quality of the book being talked about here, since the author of the book is an alleged IT professional and the link he provides to the book website is wrong. He's got ubuntupocketguide.org, it's really a .com.
And that's why I used the scare quotes around the word, to indicate that it didn't really mean what the word really means. Some things that people call science today really aren't, and that applies to more than intelligent design. Pretty much all "science" that deals with the origin of life is scare-quote "science".
Science cannot be dogma. Dogma is the opposite of science. You seem quite confused about this topic.
I would charge that those who have accepted dogma as science are the confused ones, but you are free to have your own opinion. Yes, true science doesn't have dogma; but that only shows that everything that is called science today really isn't.
And no, I'm not confused at all, but your insult was a nice attempt at confusing the discussion.
That's only if you don't understand what hate-crimes legislation is intended to accomplish.
Yes, I understand what it is intended to accomplish.
Not just any crime against a gay person is a hate crime.
Well, that's how it is supposed to work, in theory.
If you beat a gay man because he's gay,
The tacit assumption when any straight beats any gay.
To suggest that they are a form of discrimination against bigoted criminals is ridiculous.
Well, you are the only one claiming it is discrimination against "bigoted criminals"'; I think most people who talk about such legislation see it as discrimination against law-abiding straights. As in, "a crime against a gay seems to be more serious than a crime against a straight, yet we are all supposed to be equal."
In any case, I think that was the point I was making in regard to the comment from the OP. Calling a law that protects scientists studying one thing discrimination against all other scientists is ridiculous, just like calling a law that protects gays discrimination against everyone else has been branded ridiculous. You just made my point for me.
actually, this bill is discrimination against every other religion that's out there.
This argument doesn't get very far when it is made regarding laws regarding sexual orientation, so I don't think you want to make it here.
A law against "discrimination of all religions" is different than a law against discrimination of a single religion.
As is a law against discrimination because someone is gay. Or a law that says a crime against a gay person is a "hate crime" and thus must be punished more than the same crime committed against anyone else.
Neither does mistaking religion for science.
You know that applies to a lot of "science" that is dogma today, don't you? I don't think you intended to be as inclusive in that statement as it really is, that's why I'm asking.
I take offense at your threat to sue, and am discussing a countersuit with my attorney right now. I clean up well and juries like me. I will sue you in Texas and ask for millions in damages. You will lose. Cut your losses now and just send me a $10 note and we'll call it good.
... but he was "Tried in the public courts" as they say.
I think the actual saying is "tried in the court of public opinion". The courts we have around here are all "public courts", at least the legal ones. The tennis courts are private, however...
However, any university wishing to appear credible is *not* going to have someone studying mortgage failures that was implicated in even a tangential way with an actual mortgage fraud. "Avoid even the illusion of impropriety."
And yet, a lot of people who read this blog, being of a technical bent, will say that the best employment for a black hat is as a white hat because he knows the subject pretty well. Why would this be any different? And since there were no legal sanctions, exactly what legal grounds does the Uni have for firing him? Something to do with "innocent until proven guilty".
Is implication supposed to be good enough for a government to treat someone like they are guilty now?
If you want to make a boast about how fast it is, do it like they used to do with modems: give us an actual numeric speed (e.g. 1200bps, 19.2kbps).
You mean like the 56k modems that couldn't legally do 56k, they were capped at 53.something? Or the 56k modems that wouldn't achieve even 53.something unless you were on a pristine copper pair 30 feet from the central office? You mean honesty like that?
Or honesty like Qwest, who advertises all their speeds for DSL in 'megs'. Forty smeggin' megs of what? Bits? Bytes? Bauds?
They had a complete air traffic control system set up in that church. Not just "a computer".
Oh, excuse me. That means it was quite feasible for them to simply grab an icon on a computer screen and move the ILS transmitters underground by 200 feet so the airliner would fly into the ground ... NOT.
To move an ILS like that would require physically moving the transmitting antennas -- both the upper and lower beam -- to the point where you wanted the airliner to hit the ground. Not only that, but simply moving the antennas would do nothing to the aircraft altimeters -- either the barometric based one or the radar altimeter. The airplane gets to DH (decision height), which is still at least 200 feet above ground, and the pilots initiate a go-around. At worst, you get the wrong barometric pressure data into the airplane and the PNF (pilot not flying) says "hey, our radar altimeter and BP altimeter don't agree, something's wrong, let's go around...". Even if they didn't agree, vertical guidance is coming from the ILS and the worst-case altimeter defines the DH point. You still wouldn't fly into the ground, as long as you are correctly flying the ILS approach.
But simply clicking on an icon and dragging it into the ground with the plane happily following it? Horse manure, whether you are hacking into ATC or sitting at the real console itself.
She plugged her laptop into the cockpit and was able to pilot the plane again, saving all on board.
Sorta like the bad guys in one of the Die Hard movies that used their computer to hack into the air traffic control system and "move the ILS down" so the incoming airliner would crash.
...but you've got to wonder how much warning did they get.
If you read the article you linked to, you'd see:
"In places relatively far from the seismic center, people can receive the warning up to half a minute or so before the quake reaches those areas."
Far from the center, "up to half a minute". Close to the center, I'm betting less than 30 seconds. About enough time to pull your cellphone out and read the SMS text telling you that you are about to die. Enough time to almost stop the train, but not enough to move it out of harm's way.
In comparison the response in the US to Katrina seemed flat footed, as if they were caught off-guard in the aftermath of the storm and didn't quite know who was in charge.
No, everybody but one person knew who was in charge. That would be the Governor of Louisiana, who was incapable of uttering the one simple sentence that would have authorized the federal government to come to her aide: "help!".
That's the way the organization of states is set up. It has something to do with that one pesky amendment to the constitution that says something about "all powers not listed herein are reserved to the states or the citizens..." Other countries don't have this "delay" because their federal governments don't have the constitutional limits ours does.
Federal aide as idle because, by law, the feds couldn't take over a state disaster until the governor acted. She knew what was coming, it wasn't a big surprise when the hurricane that had been tracked by satellite showed up. By then it was too late. Now, usually, the governors are pro-active on this kind of thing and actually ask before it becomes a catastrophe, but ... to blame the US as a whole for the failure of one governor to act appropriately is a bit much.