Sony is pulling it to avoid offending anyone who would not like phrases from the Qur'an used in association with such a game.
The Qur'an is a written work. In arabic. There are no authorized translations into any other language. If it's english, it isn't the Qur'an. If it is an audio sample, it cannot be the Qur'an.
Sony isn't pulling it to avoid offending anyone, they are pulling it to avoid offending radical muslims, specifically.
If Sony pulled things to avoid offending anyone, they'd be pulling a lot of the crap music they produce with anti-woman, anti-Christian, or any other violent offensive language. No, those works sell well and it is unlikely that anyone will riot or put a Sony executive under a sentence of death for producing them.
In my mind Sony is actually going above and beyond to do the correct thing here.
This is hardly the "correct thing". It's offensive and insulting to people who think the free exchange of ideas is worth something -- all ideas, not just the politically correct ones dealing with one specific religion.
At this point, you're going to run up against the one advance in airplane security that *has* been made post-9/11: you're not getting through the reinforced cockpit door with anything less than a battering ram.
No, the one advance in security is not the door to the cockpit, it's the understanding on everyone's part that cooperating with a hijacker isn't in anyone's interest anymore, and the half a dozen guys (and maybe a few women) who will be beating the terrorist to a bloody pulp as the rest of the passengers applaud.
United 93 was a test. The next time, the plane won't go down while the bad guys get killed.
The first time I checked in online I thought how easy it would be to modify the boarding pass I was printing on my own printer. Duh. The experience taught me how to enter UNICODE in a postscript file (United encodes some data for passengers in UNICODE).
Much of the article talks about someone not getting things that are not illegal to fly with confiscated. He makes a big deal about carrying a flag. The screener looked at the flag. It wasn't confiscated. BIG DEAL. It isn't illegal to carry a flag on board.
He wasn't arrested for ripping up paper in a bathroom. BIG DEAL. It isn't illegal to rip up paper in a bathroom. He wasn't stopped for wearing a teeshirt.
He starts out by saying he was doing things that terrorists wouldn't do, and then complains because he wasn't questioned about doing those things.
Then the "saline solution" hole. Yes, every time you create exemptions from rules you create loopholes for bad guys to get through. Thanks for advertising the saline solution loophole, I'll remember it. Do you think that the TSA screeners should be testing fluids for what they are? There are an awful lot of different things, and any false positive is going to be lept on as another example of TSA stupidity while some poor schmuck is detained for nothing.
So, a terrorist who isn't stupid steals a credit card and buys a ticket under someone else's name. He prints a fake boarding pass with his real name (?) to get past TSA. Then he uses the original pass to get on the plane. We're told that this hole can be closed by simply checking the names at the time someone gets on the plane.
Uhhh, hand raised here. Question? If a terrorist is smart enough to steal a credit card with someone else's name to buy the ticket, won't he be smart enough to get a FAKE DRIVER'S LICENSE WITH THE SAME NAME so he can get past your new, stricter policy? You haven't closed the triangle at all. You've just made everyone feel more secure when they aren't. That's the game you are complaining about.
Hey. Every security measure can be bypassed by someone intent enough on doing it. TSA didn't find some of the things this guy was carrying that he shouldn't have been. Gee. Humans aren't perfect. Combine that and the ability to bypass anything, of course you get the logical result that we might as well not do anything to stop people from taking whatever they want on board.
So, 5-10 minutes of my day every day is spent waiting for Windows. That's 40 hours a year. Microsoft owes my company 1 week of my salary. If they were forced to pay, they'd have to raise their prices for windows and office a whole hell of a lot to be profitable.
Considering the billions of dollars Bill Gates has raked off the top, I doubt that being forced to pay one week of your salary would require any price increases for Microsoft to stay profitable. I suspect they could pay one week of your salary every week and still be in the black.
Fast forward to IPv4 -- any address that isn't being used (and by used I mean that there is no web presence, to use of e-mail, etc.) after a certain time period (perhaps 1-2 year(s)) then the address is revoked and put back into the public pool.
Not every use of an IP address is for a web server. I run two systems with web servers on them. All of the rest have no need and will not run web services, and yes, I need to be able to get into them from outside.
Further, many of them are firewalled so only specific outside places can get in. Yeah, run a web server to make them "legal", but YOU won't be able to get to the server to detect it.
Obviously, the easiest way to get around this little regulation would be to put up a place holder page,
Yes, obviously, the answer to this problem is to run useless servers where they aren't needed, opening up security holes as the bugs are uncovered, increasing the administrative workload for everyone and making a field day for crackers. Sure.
Now, one could argue that targeting IT professionals would be an exercise in futility.
Similarly, you'd think that spamming "postmaster" or "abuse" at a domain would be futile and wasteful, but I get more spam there than at my actual address.
The vans are a hoax. Even the bbc describes them as 'a deterrent'.
You do know that something being a deterrent doesn't mean it is a hoax, don't you?
Do you also believe that TEMPEST monitoring is a hoax?
TV's are notoriously bad at shielding, especially in the IF frequencies they use (40 something MHz). CRTs have a 15kHz high voltage generator that emits hash well up into the 30 or 40 MHz range. It is not hard to detect a TV, it is only hard to detect if the source is licensed.
As far as I could find, evidence from a 'detector van' has NEVER been used in court.
Again, not being used in court doesn't mean it is a hoax. For most people, having a government agent knock on your door saying "where's your TV license?" is enough to get them to buy one.
Now, if you want to talk about hoaxes, maybe the Ministry of Housinge's Cat Detector Van is where you want to focus.
If this, and the article, are true then that's gross incompetence on the part of the aircraft builders and the authorities that certify them as air worthy.
Nonsense. That's life. Life isn't perfect. You can't build a perfect airplane. You can't even build two exactly identical airplanes. You can't test every airplane against every possible interference source or every possible failure mode.
The BEST you can do is test for what you can. Even that testing is limited by how much money and time it would take to do the tests.
And even THEN, you need to determine what your limits are for testing. What G-force do you build a plane to withstand? Infinite? 5G? Where do you set the line?
Consumer radios (wireless lans, mobile phones etc) put out tiny amounts of power, typically milliwatts.
And there's the problem. "Typically". Every unintentional radiator has to meet FCC Part 15 levels. They get this certification by testing a few units early in the production life of a device. These tests are expensive and slow, requiring shielded rooms and sensitive broadband test gear.
They can't test every unit, it would cost too much.
Some companies make production changes to devices after their certification, which changes the leakage -- but they don't bother getting recertified. Some certification is based on a specific configuration of the device. Laptops, for example, may be certified using only the touchpad, and may exceed part 15 limits if a mouse is plugged in the USB port. They may be tested with a monitor plugged in, but only pass if the monitor cable has the ferrite beads (lump near each end of the cable) installed.
Your CD player may pass without a headset plugged in, or with the provided headset, but fail when you plug in your special noise cancelling headset.
Or, despite every best effort, the device may fail because of an electrical failure. I've already mentioned the Toshiba television that was picked up by the SARSAT satellite system because it was emitting a strong signal on 121.5MHz. You don't think that an electronic manufacturer would design their products to emit strong signals on a worldwide emergency frequency, do you? This one did -- even though the TV appeared to be working just fine. There was no reason to believe it was defective, other than half a dozen uniformed CAP cadets standing in the kitchen of the small apartment saying it was.
If that's really a problem air traffic control radio, nearby commercial radio stations, mobile 'phone masts, all of which pump out far more em, would cause crashes every day.
There's that hyperbole again. The problem is not limited to "crashes". All of those you listed are KNOWN radiators in known locations, and yes, indeedy doo, they can cause interference in aviation navigation systems. The difference is that they are not moving with the airplane, and eventually their effect will go away. Most of them are also mapped on the aviation charts. All of those are under heavy FCC regulation for what they can emit, and have staff members who maintain the equipment to stay legal.
I used to fly out of Syracuse, NY, and just to the south west of the airport are some major FM broadcasters. The nav systems would go bats every time I flew over/near them. I knew this, planned for it, and simply used the backup systems (compass, DG, and altitude indicator) while I was in the vicinity. Eventually, the OBS would come back to life and I'd use it again.
So I call bullshit on both the article and the parent.
Just thought I'd highlight this sentence because I don't believe anyone who really knew what they were talking about would refer to "CPU speakers".
Well, believe it. That was a poor way of shortening the entire phrase "speakers connected to your desktop computer", but it has nothing to do with the rest of the story.
My speakers also make that noise when my GSM phone is near. Strangely though, my system unit - which is just as close - remains 100% stable and passes memtest or any other diagnostics I throw at it.
So you've heard the interference I was talking about, yet you post this article claiming I don't know what I am talking about.
Guess what? I, too, have a "system unit" close to where I am. Every time I transmit from my amateur radio in the 440MHz range, it shuts off. Handheld, 1W. Wham. No warning. Just off. It's called "interference", and it happens. Believe it.
Let's consider why the FMC commands any sort of elevator deflection at all.
You use a lot of technical terms, but I don't know that you are right.
For one, the "maximum turbulent air speed" is not because "deflections will increase as pressure altitude varies". It is based on the maximum structural load of the airplane and the airspeed at which a full scale deflection of the elevators will exceed that. The assumption is that you will only apply full scale deflections while trying to overcome turbulence. (Better known as "maneuvering speed", as I recall.)
For all the analysis, it comes down to this: there are computers that control the plane based on sensor inputs. If you screw up the sensor inputs or whack the computer, odd things can happen. I don't mean screw up a sensor by having it read 10psi instead of 14psi, I mean making it read 134 psi. Or -31 psi. That's what interference can do.
Most interference doesn't cause flight control changes of a gross nature. That doesn't allow us to say it cannot happen.
Scale models and in some case full mockups of various materials and construction...
Are not "the equipment" we're talking about. We are talking about airplanes, not scale models or mockups of materials.
Airplanes are not tested against direct lightning strikes. There may be MODELS that are tested, but then, models rarely demonstrate the electrical interference problems that the real things have. Or the simple miswiring that can happen. Models are no where near as complex as the full sized item.
Lightning strikes are quite a common occurrence in flight, and if the machine is too fragile to survive one...
I agree, it may be common, and they do need to survive them, but "the equipment" (which is "this airplane I am sitting in right now using my wireless mouse" in the context of this discussion) has not been tested against a strike, and the problem of electrical interference is much different than "fail to survive" from a lightning strike. If you don't think a lightning strike interferes with radios, read this month's Flying magazine. It has a story of a pilot who flew through one. His radios -- no work anymore. The plane survived.
GP never said any such thing. They merely stated that [the equipment] be tested for direct lightening strikes.
And the only way to test the equipment for direct lightning strikes is to run "the equipment" through a lightning strike. The closest place to find a lightning strike is in a thunderstorm.
You can't just test one copy of "the equipment", because every copy is slightly different. There are tens of thousands of pieces and screws and bolts in every piece of "equipment", and a missing screw in the wrong place may be what causes "the equipment" to fail.
You also have to do it every time "the equipment" comes out of maintenance, because that changes "the equipment" in some way. A wrong piece installed might cause the failure this time.
I call strawman on your oranges. I didn't say that oranges were tested for direct lightning strikes (or even that they were tested for ripeness). If you test 'the equipment' against lightning strikes, it needs a lightning strike. NO, aircraft are not tested against direct lightning strikes. It just isn't done.
Another reason to keep devices off is so you're concentrating on the announcements that are made,
A reason that is trivially easy to disprove.
I travel with Bose noise-cancelling headsets. On most aircraft, the best way to understand the announcements is to plug into the onboard audio system. That's especially true while in the air when engine noise swamps the speakers.
I am ALWAYS asked to turn my headsets off. Always.
If the goal was "concentrate on the announcements", then listening to them via the headset would be the best possible outcome. If the goal was concentrating on the announcements, they wouldn't allow me to keep them on my head, since they deaden the sound naturally -- keeping me from hearing the announcements. They don't care if I wear them, but that little red LED on the side must absolutely be "off".
And before you say that I can't concentrate if I'm listening to the onboard music, keep in mind that the announcements mute the music and play over every channel -- you can't miss them!
No, you need a bottle of acetone and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, both of which look like water. One might look fizzy, just like Seven Up. The other has a different index of refraction and smell and taste, but the former isn't regularly tested at TSA checkpoints, and the latter two won't be for obvious reasons.
Unless there is some way of telling that the bottle you have actually contains water and not either of the other two, the only way to ban acetone/H2O2 is to ban water, too.
That leaves open the question of whether it should be, but covers why water.
...not so much true when you're talking about a multi-million dollar airplane that has to pass rigorous testing for things like RF and electrical interference...
Now if only every aircraft had to pass rigorous testing every time it came out of maintenance, or even right from the factory. Rigorous? No. Some? Maybe.
A GPSr is a radio receiver only. It doesn't transmit anything.
From a technical standpoint, every modern receiver (superhetrodyne or even hetrodyne) is also a transmitter. Every one of them has a local oscillator which is mixed with the incoming signal to convert it to an intermediate frequency (IF) that is then converted to audio (or data, or whatever). That oscillator leaks.
The FCC has limits on how much it can leak, but "0" is not the limit. Part 15 of 47CFR covers this. Unlicensed unintentional radiators. Even a unit that passes the tests at the factory can change over time as the grounding deteriorates.
So, yes, your GPS is emitting signals while it is receiving them, too. Your FM radio does it, your AM radio does it. I don't know the IF for your GPS, but a common IF for FM radios is 10.7MHz. That means while you are listening to 101.1 FM the Golden Rock for The Big City Listener, you are also transmitting on, perhaps 111.8 MHz. Perhaps 10.7MHz below 101.1. Depends on how the radio is designed. Guess where 111.8 MHz is? Aviation band. Navigation.
Your GPS also deals a LOT with data at high data rates. Square waves. Square waves have many harmonics. The GPS in my car, which is housed in a small, grounded metal box (unlike most commercial OTS units which are in plastic) radiates perfectly on 155.49 MHz. It's a permanent carrier, modulated by the data. Right on top of the local police frequency.
And finally, if you think commercial electronics can't cause a problem, google for the story of the Toshiba television and 121.5MHz. In short, a poor college student was gotten out of bed early one Sunday morning and had uniformed CAP people standing around his apartment telling him that he could not watch TV anymore, because his Toshiba TV was broadcasting a signal on 121.5MHz (the emergency frequency) that was being picked up by passing satellites. I was there. This is not an urban legend.
I would be extremely amazed if your GPSr was affecting anything.
I agree it is unlikely that your GPS will interfere with an airplane's systems, but asking for permission is certainly not out of line. When you ask, you can make sure it isn't a problem. If you don't, it might be and you might be putting a lot of work onto the pilot.
Umm, they test a wide range of frequencies and devices.
They test a limited number of devices and frequencies. It is physically impossible to test every aircraft with every device possible at every location within the airplane. It just cannot be done. And they cannot test every device, because they haven't tested my PDA -- which may or may not still meet FCC requirements for part 15 emissions since I opened it up to fix it.
The BEST you can do is try to prevent interference from happening, but you cannot test all devices and all frequencies at all locations.
Any device irregardless of broadcast strength and frequency is not going to affect an electrical connection, pretty much guaranteed.
That's patent and obvious nonsense.
The FAA doesn't fuck around with this stuff, as much as airline corporations do however.
And it isn't the FAA in the hangers doing the maintenance on the airplanes, even if the FAA had as strict a set of regulations as you claim, which they don't.
So don't make shit up.
Wise advice.
Example: if you have your cd player in your bag during takeoff, they aren't going to know or stop you because they won't even see it. Is the plane going to crash? Well, you tell me.
If it is off, probably not because of it. If it is on, probably not, because the interference will have been detected prior to taxi or starting the takeoff roll.
If you turn it on suddenly while the plane is 100 feet above ground, well, there is simply no reason to take that risk. Yes, I've had CD players that generate a LOT of RF noise, and some of them are right smack on top of a frequency I need to listen to.
As an individual example, I've been flying for 20 years doing as such, and I haven't heard pilots complaining of malfunctions or "OMG TURN THAT OFF" either.
I have. Most of the time, they don't have the TIME to stop dealing with the problem to ask if someone has something turned on. They have to solve it first, and then may ask people to check that they've not turned on a cell phone or pager or something like that. But yes, I've heard it. And even without them asking, I've heard the cell phone buzz in the onboard audio system. If it interferes there, it can get other places.
You are trying to tell us that every airplane in the air today has been deliberately run through a thunderstorm so it will be hit by lightning, before it is allowed to be flown with passengers?
No, I don't think so. The FAA mandates certain things, but "test against DIRECT lightning strikes" is not one of them.
It doesn't matter how much EMI is created, if the EMI is at the right place and the right frequency. Megawatts of very broad band EMI might have no effect, where a few milliwatts on the right frequency is all it takes.
Plus the fact that a lightning bolt generates a very short burst, while a wireless mouse is continuous.
Anyway, fly by wire is the way to go. It has specific problems,
Anyone remember the story of the Airbus that was miswired so that the engine controls were backwards? They had a problem with the number one engine and shut down number 2 -- because the off button for 1 was connected to engine number 2 by mistake? Plane crash, people died.
Does anyone doubt that the wiring on a commercial airliner might not be perfect?
I really doubt the cause was really EMI from any passenger's gadgets.
I don't doubt it for a second. There is a reason that federal law says you must turn off electronic devices, and has for decades.
I'm a pilot, and I've seen it happen. Not the level that is reported in this story, but simple electronics interfering with navigation and flight controls. (What do you think is used as input to the autopilot? Yes, the navigation instruments.) I've been on more than one IFR flight where I had to make sure that certain radio gear was turned off before contacting certain approach controls, because that radio caused the aviation radio to be useless. And that radio was a professionally installed, certified radio, not a piece of whatever being carried by just anyone.
They're that paranoid, and I'm supposed to believe they let people on board with gear that can interfere with the steering of the plane?
Yes, you should believe they let people on board with gear that can interfere with the steering of the plane, because they let ME on a plane with gear that can interfere with the steering. They let a lot of people I know on planes with such gear. They let a lot of people like me that I don't know on planes with such gear. Only one time in twenty years of flying have I been prohibited from carrying a radio on board an airplane, and that was a long time before 9/11. A stupid KLM screener confiscated a SHORTWAVE receiver, putting it in a sealed envelope for the purser to give back to me when we arrived. During the flight I pulled out the duty free catalog, and sure enough, they would SELL me an almost identical model to the radio they took. I called the purser, and he said yeah, it was stupid, here's your radio. Just don't turn it on. Never have I had any of the transmitters I've carried refused.
The summary talks about flying the plane with a wireless mouse. That's ludicrous, and it's dishonest to pretend that that's a fair statement of the problem. The problem is not taking control of the plane by sending the correct signals to do specific things, the problem is interference in either the navigation radio or onboard electrical controls that cause UNspecific things to happen. Anyone who has heard the BRRRPP of their cell phone in the audio of their stereo or computer speakers has had the problem demonstrated to them. You don't think that CPU speakers are supposed to pick up cell phone calls, do you? Well, I've heard that BRRRRRRRP noise coming from the audio system on a airliner.
A brand-spanking new airplane straight from the factory is unlikely to suffer from onboard interference. The wiring is new, the grounds tight and corrosion free. After twenty years in the air, the wiring isn't so new anymore, the insulation may have cracks, the grounds are frayed and corroded.
Why do they take liguids away from people? Because they can. Why? Well, most liquids are cheap commodity items. So what if you can't carry on a bottle of water, the airline will give you water for free on the plane. So what if you can't carry on a bottle of coke, you can buy one for two dollars when you get off, after drinking the airline's coke enroute. So what if you can't take a gallon of shampoo onboard with you? You aren't going to wash your hair that much before you can get to a dime store to buy another for a buck. Yeah, it's annoying and stupid and a meaningless gesture, but it makes stupid people feel better about flying, and most of the people who fly are stupid. The more people who fly, the more routes there are, and the more convenient it is for me to get where I am going instead of just somewhere close.
You can't just buy a new cell phone every time you fly. Or a new laptop. Or a new PDA. While they are approaching the level of commodity items, they aren't that easy to replace, and the reason is the data on them. There is no data in a bottle of coke that makes it any different than any other. My PDA is unique in the world.
So, yeah, a terrorist could cause a lot of trouble with elec
But, FWIW, from my quick look at them, there were no obious nonsense articles.
The best nonsense articles are those that require more than a quick look to determine they are nonsense. In any joke, the punchline has to come at the end, not the beginning.
The problem is when someone who is not an expert in the field comes to a site with unreviewed articles. He can't determine in a quick look what is bogus and what isn't. If you are trying to learn about something new, unreviewed papers are a crapshoot.
A good reason to buy an Amazon Kindle/Apple iPhone/Sony Reader.
No.
I thought so too, so I bought the eReader from Sony. I deal with scientific papers alot, printing them and usually never reading them -- a pile here, a pile there.
The Sony product just doesn't cut it. Here's an unordered list of why:
The screen is TOO SMALL. Scientific papers are in small print on regular sized paper. The equations are really small. The "magnify" function tries to reformat the page when it uses larger text, and the result is usually unreadable. YMMV.
The data is unmanageable. The Sony lists all PDF documents by the embedded TITLE and AUTHOR tags, completely ignoring the file names, and without any way of changing them. Perhaps some Adobe product can. I uncompress them with pdftk and hand-edit the entries, when I can, and then recompress. Sony doesn't deal with uncompressed pdfs. I have a "folder" of papers I should be reading. One I really need to read is titled, according to the Sony, "PhysRevA_78_033810". I can't uncompress it to change it; there is a password on the file. Fortunately, it's the only Phys Rev A paper I have, the others are all JOExxxxx.
The index pages truncate titles when they are too long.
The contrast of the screen is low, especially under low light. In bright light, it's fine.
PDFs that have embedded tags for tables of contents, etc, are WONDERFUL. PDFs which don't have them show up as one big document and there is no way, other than bookmarking them, to skip from chapter to chapter. And bookmarks assume the "name" of the nearby text from somewhere on the page. I haven't found a way to change them.
The only way to get reading material onto the Sony is via the Windows EBook software. The device looks like a USB disk when plugged in, but simply copying the file doesn't get it indexed so it can be read.
The "folders" are a handy way of sorting books into collections, which is what the Sony calls them. Collections. Two problems. There is no way I've yet found to determine that all of the books on the reader have been sorted into a collection. A book that isn't in a collection has to be located by name or date of installation from the full list. Second, the order of books in a collection is based on a fixed order, not alphabetical, not date, but by position in the directory. That might be ok if you want it, but I want titles aphabetically so I can find them. For example, one "book" I downloaded came as a set of chapters, with the TITLEs set to the chapter number. When I copied them to the reader, they went in exactly opposite to alphabetical order (a wonderful side-effect of drag and drop on Windows, huh?), and I had to manually move them to correct order. The ebook software on the PC will DISPLAY them sorted in many different ways, but the reader itself is stuck in directory order.
Unrelated to the readability is a usability issue. The device will only charge off the mini-USB connection when it is connected directly to a PC USB port. I tried charging it from my travelling USB charger (that handles my phone and Palm just fine) and it DISCHARGED COMPLETELY. I think, based on observation and experiment, that the book was trying continuously to emumerate on the USB bus because it saw power (but no data ever), and ran the battery down doing that. It appears not to charge via USB unless it can get a legal, official power allocation, but it won't accept one from a hub, only a PC directly. Of course, I was travelling when that happened. There is a coax power plug, which Sony will sell you a special wallwart to charge through, but I found a simple USB to coax plug adapter and it charges that way fine. A POX on the Sony engineers that thought the USB must have an allocation before using power that appears on it. Assume power with no data is a CHARGER, for God's sake. Everyone else does.
So, no, don't go out to buy this if scientific papers and normal pdf's are your thing. It does text just beautifully (well, other
Have you never avoided an accident on the highway by speeding up?
Not to faster than 80 from a legal speed.
Whether it is better to speed up or slow down to avoid something depends so much on the situation that you can't say which is better, but speeding up is harder than slowing down. All cars have brakes; not all cars have a lot of extra horsepower to go faster that quickly.
Imagine the distance it takes to speed up from 65 to 80, compared to the stopping speed from 65.
Were I to use this system on my kids, it's because I don't want them on the interstate anyway. People who live in big cities sometimes forget this, but us yokels might live a long way from a superhighway that has 65MPH limits. I'm ten miles from the local 'I'. Everything local tops out at 55.
If an accident situation requires speeding up beyond 80MPH to avoid it around here, speeding up is going to be the wrong decision in the first place, and will only increase the momentum when you do hit in the second. It's better to slow down, even if you can't avoid an accident that way, just to reduce the speed you hit at.
What this boils down to is that when going from air to water, anything that isn't bolted down is going to come flying forward and that will include human bodies, even if they are strapped into their seats.
Yeah, it's almost as bad as the problem of getting an airplane going 300 MPH with respect to the ground to a complete stop on the ground.
Personally, I won't go flying until I'm certain they've figured out how they can get a plane to stop without everything that isn't bolted down flying forward into the front of the plane. I don't want to be like Dark Helmet coming out of ludicrous speed!
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The Qur'an is a written work. In arabic. There are no authorized translations into any other language. If it's english, it isn't the Qur'an. If it is an audio sample, it cannot be the Qur'an.
Sony isn't pulling it to avoid offending anyone, they are pulling it to avoid offending radical muslims, specifically. If Sony pulled things to avoid offending anyone, they'd be pulling a lot of the crap music they produce with anti-woman, anti-Christian, or any other violent offensive language. No, those works sell well and it is unlikely that anyone will riot or put a Sony executive under a sentence of death for producing them.
In my mind Sony is actually going above and beyond to do the correct thing here.
This is hardly the "correct thing". It's offensive and insulting to people who think the free exchange of ideas is worth something -- all ideas, not just the politically correct ones dealing with one specific religion.
No, the one advance in security is not the door to the cockpit, it's the understanding on everyone's part that cooperating with a hijacker isn't in anyone's interest anymore, and the half a dozen guys (and maybe a few women) who will be beating the terrorist to a bloody pulp as the rest of the passengers applaud.
United 93 was a test. The next time, the plane won't go down while the bad guys get killed.
Much of the article talks about someone not getting things that are not illegal to fly with confiscated. He makes a big deal about carrying a flag. The screener looked at the flag. It wasn't confiscated. BIG DEAL. It isn't illegal to carry a flag on board. He wasn't arrested for ripping up paper in a bathroom. BIG DEAL. It isn't illegal to rip up paper in a bathroom. He wasn't stopped for wearing a teeshirt.
He starts out by saying he was doing things that terrorists wouldn't do, and then complains because he wasn't questioned about doing those things.
Then the "saline solution" hole. Yes, every time you create exemptions from rules you create loopholes for bad guys to get through. Thanks for advertising the saline solution loophole, I'll remember it. Do you think that the TSA screeners should be testing fluids for what they are? There are an awful lot of different things, and any false positive is going to be lept on as another example of TSA stupidity while some poor schmuck is detained for nothing.
So, a terrorist who isn't stupid steals a credit card and buys a ticket under someone else's name. He prints a fake boarding pass with his real name (?) to get past TSA. Then he uses the original pass to get on the plane. We're told that this hole can be closed by simply checking the names at the time someone gets on the plane.
Uhhh, hand raised here. Question? If a terrorist is smart enough to steal a credit card with someone else's name to buy the ticket, won't he be smart enough to get a FAKE DRIVER'S LICENSE WITH THE SAME NAME so he can get past your new, stricter policy? You haven't closed the triangle at all. You've just made everyone feel more secure when they aren't. That's the game you are complaining about.
Hey. Every security measure can be bypassed by someone intent enough on doing it. TSA didn't find some of the things this guy was carrying that he shouldn't have been. Gee. Humans aren't perfect. Combine that and the ability to bypass anything, of course you get the logical result that we might as well not do anything to stop people from taking whatever they want on board.
That's MISTER Slowski to you, speedy.
Considering the billions of dollars Bill Gates has raked off the top, I doubt that being forced to pay one week of your salary would require any price increases for Microsoft to stay profitable. I suspect they could pay one week of your salary every week and still be in the black.
It's nice to daydream, though.
Not every use of an IP address is for a web server. I run two systems with web servers on them. All of the rest have no need and will not run web services, and yes, I need to be able to get into them from outside.
Further, many of them are firewalled so only specific outside places can get in. Yeah, run a web server to make them "legal", but YOU won't be able to get to the server to detect it.
Obviously, the easiest way to get around this little regulation would be to put up a place holder page,
Yes, obviously, the answer to this problem is to run useless servers where they aren't needed, opening up security holes as the bugs are uncovered, increasing the administrative workload for everyone and making a field day for crackers. Sure.
My $0.02
Right.
Similarly, you'd think that spamming "postmaster" or "abuse" at a domain would be futile and wasteful, but I get more spam there than at my actual address.
You do know that something being a deterrent doesn't mean it is a hoax, don't you?
Do you also believe that TEMPEST monitoring is a hoax?
TV's are notoriously bad at shielding, especially in the IF frequencies they use (40 something MHz). CRTs have a 15kHz high voltage generator that emits hash well up into the 30 or 40 MHz range. It is not hard to detect a TV, it is only hard to detect if the source is licensed.
As far as I could find, evidence from a 'detector van' has NEVER been used in court.
Again, not being used in court doesn't mean it is a hoax. For most people, having a government agent knock on your door saying "where's your TV license?" is enough to get them to buy one.
Now, if you want to talk about hoaxes, maybe the Ministry of Housinge's Cat Detector Van is where you want to focus.
Nonsense. That's life. Life isn't perfect. You can't build a perfect airplane. You can't even build two exactly identical airplanes. You can't test every airplane against every possible interference source or every possible failure mode.
The BEST you can do is test for what you can. Even that testing is limited by how much money and time it would take to do the tests.
And even THEN, you need to determine what your limits are for testing. What G-force do you build a plane to withstand? Infinite? 5G? Where do you set the line?
Consumer radios (wireless lans, mobile phones etc) put out tiny amounts of power, typically milliwatts.
And there's the problem. "Typically". Every unintentional radiator has to meet FCC Part 15 levels. They get this certification by testing a few units early in the production life of a device. These tests are expensive and slow, requiring shielded rooms and sensitive broadband test gear.
They can't test every unit, it would cost too much.
Some companies make production changes to devices after their certification, which changes the leakage -- but they don't bother getting recertified. Some certification is based on a specific configuration of the device. Laptops, for example, may be certified using only the touchpad, and may exceed part 15 limits if a mouse is plugged in the USB port. They may be tested with a monitor plugged in, but only pass if the monitor cable has the ferrite beads (lump near each end of the cable) installed.
Your CD player may pass without a headset plugged in, or with the provided headset, but fail when you plug in your special noise cancelling headset.
Or, despite every best effort, the device may fail because of an electrical failure. I've already mentioned the Toshiba television that was picked up by the SARSAT satellite system because it was emitting a strong signal on 121.5MHz. You don't think that an electronic manufacturer would design their products to emit strong signals on a worldwide emergency frequency, do you? This one did -- even though the TV appeared to be working just fine. There was no reason to believe it was defective, other than half a dozen uniformed CAP cadets standing in the kitchen of the small apartment saying it was.
If that's really a problem air traffic control radio, nearby commercial radio stations, mobile 'phone masts, all of which pump out far more em, would cause crashes every day.
There's that hyperbole again. The problem is not limited to "crashes". All of those you listed are KNOWN radiators in known locations, and yes, indeedy doo, they can cause interference in aviation navigation systems. The difference is that they are not moving with the airplane, and eventually their effect will go away. Most of them are also mapped on the aviation charts. All of those are under heavy FCC regulation for what they can emit, and have staff members who maintain the equipment to stay legal.
I used to fly out of Syracuse, NY, and just to the south west of the airport are some major FM broadcasters. The nav systems would go bats every time I flew over/near them. I knew this, planned for it, and simply used the backup systems (compass, DG, and altitude indicator) while I was in the vicinity. Eventually, the OBS would come back to life and I'd use it again.
So I call bullshit on both the article and the parent.
Call what you want, but it's a fact.
Well, believe it. That was a poor way of shortening the entire phrase "speakers connected to your desktop computer", but it has nothing to do with the rest of the story.
My speakers also make that noise when my GSM phone is near. Strangely though, my system unit - which is just as close - remains 100% stable and passes memtest or any other diagnostics I throw at it.
So you've heard the interference I was talking about, yet you post this article claiming I don't know what I am talking about.
Guess what? I, too, have a "system unit" close to where I am. Every time I transmit from my amateur radio in the 440MHz range, it shuts off. Handheld, 1W. Wham. No warning. Just off. It's called "interference", and it happens. Believe it.
You use a lot of technical terms, but I don't know that you are right.
For one, the "maximum turbulent air speed" is not because "deflections will increase as pressure altitude varies". It is based on the maximum structural load of the airplane and the airspeed at which a full scale deflection of the elevators will exceed that. The assumption is that you will only apply full scale deflections while trying to overcome turbulence. (Better known as "maneuvering speed", as I recall.)
For all the analysis, it comes down to this: there are computers that control the plane based on sensor inputs. If you screw up the sensor inputs or whack the computer, odd things can happen. I don't mean screw up a sensor by having it read 10psi instead of 14psi, I mean making it read 134 psi. Or -31 psi. That's what interference can do.
Most interference doesn't cause flight control changes of a gross nature. That doesn't allow us to say it cannot happen.
Actually no, then.
Scale models and in some case full mockups of various materials and construction ...
Are not "the equipment" we're talking about. We are talking about airplanes, not scale models or mockups of materials.
Airplanes are not tested against direct lightning strikes. There may be MODELS that are tested, but then, models rarely demonstrate the electrical interference problems that the real things have. Or the simple miswiring that can happen. Models are no where near as complex as the full sized item.
Lightning strikes are quite a common occurrence in flight, and if the machine is too fragile to survive one ...
I agree, it may be common, and they do need to survive them, but "the equipment" (which is "this airplane I am sitting in right now using my wireless mouse" in the context of this discussion) has not been tested against a strike, and the problem of electrical interference is much different than "fail to survive" from a lightning strike. If you don't think a lightning strike interferes with radios, read this month's Flying magazine. It has a story of a pilot who flew through one. His radios -- no work anymore. The plane survived.
And the only way to test the equipment for direct lightning strikes is to run "the equipment" through a lightning strike. The closest place to find a lightning strike is in a thunderstorm.
You can't just test one copy of "the equipment", because every copy is slightly different. There are tens of thousands of pieces and screws and bolts in every piece of "equipment", and a missing screw in the wrong place may be what causes "the equipment" to fail.
You also have to do it every time "the equipment" comes out of maintenance, because that changes "the equipment" in some way. A wrong piece installed might cause the failure this time.
I call strawman on your oranges. I didn't say that oranges were tested for direct lightning strikes (or even that they were tested for ripeness). If you test 'the equipment' against lightning strikes, it needs a lightning strike. NO, aircraft are not tested against direct lightning strikes. It just isn't done.
A reason that is trivially easy to disprove.
I travel with Bose noise-cancelling headsets. On most aircraft, the best way to understand the announcements is to plug into the onboard audio system. That's especially true while in the air when engine noise swamps the speakers.
I am ALWAYS asked to turn my headsets off. Always.
If the goal was "concentrate on the announcements", then listening to them via the headset would be the best possible outcome. If the goal was concentrating on the announcements, they wouldn't allow me to keep them on my head, since they deaden the sound naturally -- keeping me from hearing the announcements. They don't care if I wear them, but that little red LED on the side must absolutely be "off".
And before you say that I can't concentrate if I'm listening to the onboard music, keep in mind that the announcements mute the music and play over every channel -- you can't miss them!
Unless there is some way of telling that the bottle you have actually contains water and not either of the other two, the only way to ban acetone/H2O2 is to ban water, too.
That leaves open the question of whether it should be, but covers why water.
Now if only every aircraft had to pass rigorous testing every time it came out of maintenance, or even right from the factory. Rigorous? No. Some? Maybe.
From a technical standpoint, every modern receiver (superhetrodyne or even hetrodyne) is also a transmitter. Every one of them has a local oscillator which is mixed with the incoming signal to convert it to an intermediate frequency (IF) that is then converted to audio (or data, or whatever). That oscillator leaks.
The FCC has limits on how much it can leak, but "0" is not the limit. Part 15 of 47CFR covers this. Unlicensed unintentional radiators. Even a unit that passes the tests at the factory can change over time as the grounding deteriorates.
So, yes, your GPS is emitting signals while it is receiving them, too. Your FM radio does it, your AM radio does it. I don't know the IF for your GPS, but a common IF for FM radios is 10.7MHz. That means while you are listening to 101.1 FM the Golden Rock for The Big City Listener, you are also transmitting on, perhaps 111.8 MHz. Perhaps 10.7MHz below 101.1. Depends on how the radio is designed. Guess where 111.8 MHz is? Aviation band. Navigation.
Your GPS also deals a LOT with data at high data rates. Square waves. Square waves have many harmonics. The GPS in my car, which is housed in a small, grounded metal box (unlike most commercial OTS units which are in plastic) radiates perfectly on 155.49 MHz. It's a permanent carrier, modulated by the data. Right on top of the local police frequency.
And finally, if you think commercial electronics can't cause a problem, google for the story of the Toshiba television and 121.5MHz. In short, a poor college student was gotten out of bed early one Sunday morning and had uniformed CAP people standing around his apartment telling him that he could not watch TV anymore, because his Toshiba TV was broadcasting a signal on 121.5MHz (the emergency frequency) that was being picked up by passing satellites. I was there. This is not an urban legend.
I would be extremely amazed if your GPSr was affecting anything.
I agree it is unlikely that your GPS will interfere with an airplane's systems, but asking for permission is certainly not out of line. When you ask, you can make sure it isn't a problem. If you don't, it might be and you might be putting a lot of work onto the pilot.
They test a limited number of devices and frequencies. It is physically impossible to test every aircraft with every device possible at every location within the airplane. It just cannot be done. And they cannot test every device, because they haven't tested my PDA -- which may or may not still meet FCC requirements for part 15 emissions since I opened it up to fix it.
The BEST you can do is try to prevent interference from happening, but you cannot test all devices and all frequencies at all locations.
Any device irregardless of broadcast strength and frequency is not going to affect an electrical connection, pretty much guaranteed.
That's patent and obvious nonsense.
The FAA doesn't fuck around with this stuff, as much as airline corporations do however.
And it isn't the FAA in the hangers doing the maintenance on the airplanes, even if the FAA had as strict a set of regulations as you claim, which they don't.
So don't make shit up.
Wise advice.
Example: if you have your cd player in your bag during takeoff, they aren't going to know or stop you because they won't even see it. Is the plane going to crash? Well, you tell me.
If it is off, probably not because of it. If it is on, probably not, because the interference will have been detected prior to taxi or starting the takeoff roll.
If you turn it on suddenly while the plane is 100 feet above ground, well, there is simply no reason to take that risk. Yes, I've had CD players that generate a LOT of RF noise, and some of them are right smack on top of a frequency I need to listen to.
As an individual example, I've been flying for 20 years doing as such, and I haven't heard pilots complaining of malfunctions or "OMG TURN THAT OFF" either.
I have. Most of the time, they don't have the TIME to stop dealing with the problem to ask if someone has something turned on. They have to solve it first, and then may ask people to check that they've not turned on a cell phone or pager or something like that. But yes, I've heard it. And even without them asking, I've heard the cell phone buzz in the onboard audio system. If it interferes there, it can get other places.
You are trying to tell us that every airplane in the air today has been deliberately run through a thunderstorm so it will be hit by lightning, before it is allowed to be flown with passengers?
No, I don't think so. The FAA mandates certain things, but "test against DIRECT lightning strikes" is not one of them.
It doesn't matter how much EMI is created, if the EMI is at the right place and the right frequency. Megawatts of very broad band EMI might have no effect, where a few milliwatts on the right frequency is all it takes.
Plus the fact that a lightning bolt generates a very short burst, while a wireless mouse is continuous.
Anyone remember the story of the Airbus that was miswired so that the engine controls were backwards? They had a problem with the number one engine and shut down number 2 -- because the off button for 1 was connected to engine number 2 by mistake? Plane crash, people died.
Does anyone doubt that the wiring on a commercial airliner might not be perfect?
I don't doubt it for a second. There is a reason that federal law says you must turn off electronic devices, and has for decades.
I'm a pilot, and I've seen it happen. Not the level that is reported in this story, but simple electronics interfering with navigation and flight controls. (What do you think is used as input to the autopilot? Yes, the navigation instruments.) I've been on more than one IFR flight where I had to make sure that certain radio gear was turned off before contacting certain approach controls, because that radio caused the aviation radio to be useless. And that radio was a professionally installed, certified radio, not a piece of whatever being carried by just anyone.
They're that paranoid, and I'm supposed to believe they let people on board with gear that can interfere with the steering of the plane?
Yes, you should believe they let people on board with gear that can interfere with the steering of the plane, because they let ME on a plane with gear that can interfere with the steering. They let a lot of people I know on planes with such gear. They let a lot of people like me that I don't know on planes with such gear. Only one time in twenty years of flying have I been prohibited from carrying a radio on board an airplane, and that was a long time before 9/11. A stupid KLM screener confiscated a SHORTWAVE receiver, putting it in a sealed envelope for the purser to give back to me when we arrived. During the flight I pulled out the duty free catalog, and sure enough, they would SELL me an almost identical model to the radio they took. I called the purser, and he said yeah, it was stupid, here's your radio. Just don't turn it on. Never have I had any of the transmitters I've carried refused.
The summary talks about flying the plane with a wireless mouse. That's ludicrous, and it's dishonest to pretend that that's a fair statement of the problem. The problem is not taking control of the plane by sending the correct signals to do specific things, the problem is interference in either the navigation radio or onboard electrical controls that cause UNspecific things to happen. Anyone who has heard the BRRRPP of their cell phone in the audio of their stereo or computer speakers has had the problem demonstrated to them. You don't think that CPU speakers are supposed to pick up cell phone calls, do you? Well, I've heard that BRRRRRRRP noise coming from the audio system on a airliner.
A brand-spanking new airplane straight from the factory is unlikely to suffer from onboard interference. The wiring is new, the grounds tight and corrosion free. After twenty years in the air, the wiring isn't so new anymore, the insulation may have cracks, the grounds are frayed and corroded.
Why do they take liguids away from people? Because they can. Why? Well, most liquids are cheap commodity items. So what if you can't carry on a bottle of water, the airline will give you water for free on the plane. So what if you can't carry on a bottle of coke, you can buy one for two dollars when you get off, after drinking the airline's coke enroute. So what if you can't take a gallon of shampoo onboard with you? You aren't going to wash your hair that much before you can get to a dime store to buy another for a buck. Yeah, it's annoying and stupid and a meaningless gesture, but it makes stupid people feel better about flying, and most of the people who fly are stupid. The more people who fly, the more routes there are, and the more convenient it is for me to get where I am going instead of just somewhere close.
You can't just buy a new cell phone every time you fly. Or a new laptop. Or a new PDA. While they are approaching the level of commodity items, they aren't that easy to replace, and the reason is the data on them. There is no data in a bottle of coke that makes it any different than any other. My PDA is unique in the world.
So, yeah, a terrorist could cause a lot of trouble with elec
The best nonsense articles are those that require more than a quick look to determine they are nonsense. In any joke, the punchline has to come at the end, not the beginning.
The problem is when someone who is not an expert in the field comes to a site with unreviewed articles. He can't determine in a quick look what is bogus and what isn't. If you are trying to learn about something new, unreviewed papers are a crapshoot.
No.
I thought so too, so I bought the eReader from Sony. I deal with scientific papers alot, printing them and usually never reading them -- a pile here, a pile there.
The Sony product just doesn't cut it. Here's an unordered list of why:
So, no, don't go out to buy this if scientific papers and normal pdf's are your thing. It does text just beautifully (well, other
Not to faster than 80 from a legal speed.
Whether it is better to speed up or slow down to avoid something depends so much on the situation that you can't say which is better, but speeding up is harder than slowing down. All cars have brakes; not all cars have a lot of extra horsepower to go faster that quickly.
Imagine the distance it takes to speed up from 65 to 80, compared to the stopping speed from 65.
Were I to use this system on my kids, it's because I don't want them on the interstate anyway. People who live in big cities sometimes forget this, but us yokels might live a long way from a superhighway that has 65MPH limits. I'm ten miles from the local 'I'. Everything local tops out at 55.
If an accident situation requires speeding up beyond 80MPH to avoid it around here, speeding up is going to be the wrong decision in the first place, and will only increase the momentum when you do hit in the second. It's better to slow down, even if you can't avoid an accident that way, just to reduce the speed you hit at.
Yeah, it's almost as bad as the problem of getting an airplane going 300 MPH with respect to the ground to a complete stop on the ground.
Personally, I won't go flying until I'm certain they've figured out how they can get a plane to stop without everything that isn't bolted down flying forward into the front of the plane. I don't want to be like Dark Helmet coming out of ludicrous speed!