ACARS has several component systems; some are common to all airlines and others are unique to each particular carrier. At its simplest form it provides very basic information regarding the status of a flight (takeoff, landing, gate departures and arrivals) and in-flight weather information (making each plane in to a temporary weather station).
Some air carriers use ACARS for much more comprehensive functions like monitoring the status of equipment on aircraft in flight (maintenance scheduling), passenger information or cargo requirements. Those carriers are going to be more susceptible to periods of high demand across bandwidth limited VHF frequencies or availability to a satellite uplink.
ACARS has become so useful that it is now hitting some limits because of the high demand for the functionality.
To Mr. Assange it is all about Mr. Assange. It has come down to his sexual misdeeds in Sweden and that they are not going to back down on his prosecution.
His life will be allot less fun if he was in a Swedish prison doing a few years for rape. Then he will just be another "common criminal" and not worth bytes to write articles about his latest proclamations.
That Ecuador was stuck with this guy is rather interesting[ Now they are stuck with him and I bet he is getting tired of eating cuy (guinea pig).
Usually people who get their panties in such a knot over personal scandals being revealed to the general public have a few skeletons in the closet.
Who wants to put money on the thought that maybe Lord Neuberger has more than a few "kinks" of his own. I wonder if he likes to dress up like a schoolgirl and get his ass paddled by a dominatrix.
There is more than one microphone on any voice recorder. There may be as many as five on some aircraft. Also, degrading the sound quality by lowering the data rate can mask other sounds that are even more critical than a flight crews last words.
I am guilty of engineering a retrofit of lighting at a oil terminal to replace the long, yellow, low-pressure sodium lighting bulbs (400 watts) with 1500 watt HID lights.
The old light system was dim, with poor color rendition. The oil terminal could not do any work in the yard at night and it was difficult to detect a problem. (it was dark).
I went about in replacing all of the low pressure sodium lights with new 1500 watt, HID heads on the poles. Not being the one who was actually doing the wiring and never having gone back to that site at night, I did not know how bright it would be.
A year later I was flying into O'Hare airport (runway 14L) and looked out the passenger window. I saw this enormous white blur of lights about a mile away from the end of the runway. It was dazzling. Looking closer I recognized the layout of the oil terminal.
The installers put the fixtures on the poles but did not tilt them down enough. At least half the lighting was shining right into the eyes of the pilots on approach of 14L. I quickly asked our guys to tilt those damned lights down.
It was probably bright enough in the cockpit of the plane so they could have read a book while on approach.
I work in the electrical engineering field and have worked with a few other engineers who had been working as H1B workers.They did not have a particular talent or specialty that was lacking in any "domestic" engineer we had on staff. While I was friendly with the two engineers I knew of plenty of former classmates who were unemployed and equally (or more) qualified for the H1B position.
I never understood why the company I worked for went through such machinations to keep the two H1B engineers after they had laid off nearly twenty other engineers.
When employers are doing job reductions (layoffs) they should be required to re-justify why they laid off domestic workers vs. terminating H1B employees. This should be more than a single sentence about how this person has specialized skills that none of their American counterparts had.
The greatest fear should be internal contamination. Many of the radioactive isotopes mimic their non-radioactive elements or have a similar biological uptake. (Strontium vs. Calcium), (normal Iodine 127 vs. radioactive Iodine 131).
For dosage calculations it is important to know if it is an alpha particle, beta particle, gamma ray or neutron. Each has different penetrating capabilities and different destructive potential.
If I had a choice between 1 Sievert of gamma radiation given externally or 10 milliSieverts of an internal dose of Iodine 131 (8 day half life) or Polonium 210 (138 day half-life) I would take the external dose.
Polonium is a wicked producer of alpha particles. When ingested or inhaled it is toxic in addition to giving you a constant source of radiation (rate decreasing by 1/2 every 138 days).
I had a thyroid disorder and I opted for the Iodine 131 treatment instead of surgery. It was an internal contaminant and my sweat and urine were radioactive and I emitted enough radiation that I was supposed to stay away from people for several days (there are biological half-lives for elements in the body that are quite different from isotope decay half-lives). The treatment essentially "killed" my thyroid on purpose since it was on it's own version of a nuclear meltdown.
Need to consider external vs. internal, particle types, radiological half-life and biological half-life on any sort of dosage calculation.
Yes, such a purely hypothetical society would be filled with whack-jobs. Men who are afraid of women, men who treat women like chattel. Even the religions would get very warped.
Good thing there is no such society on THIS planet.
Simply, SyFy is about as relevant to Science Fiction as the Home Shopping Network.
It just sucks ass. We used to watch 2-3 hours of Sci-Fi each night (Babylon 5, Farscape, Lexx, etc... ) now if I had a choice I would dump the channel completely.
Even the low rent UHF channels back in the mid 70's had more science fiction (The Spider, The Blob, Creature Features, etc...) What we have now is just embarrassing.
I am amazed that Sony is persisting in being a BUNCH OF JACKASSES. When I purchased a PS3 several years ago most of the appeal was the "Other OS" feature. Sure, I have bought my share of games (>20) and enjoy those too. Selling something (Other OS) and then taking it away makes many of us just think that Sony management is full of Mother-Fuc&ers.
Sony should be embracing the Other OS crowd and giving us more options to use the platform for high end computing.
Hey assholes, you made the news as a forward thinking company when you gave us the Other OS feature. Now you are making the news for being just as backwards and ignorant as Micro$oft.
What the result will be (for me) is that I will enjoy the games I have but will not spend another dime on PS3 games. Guess what, I am doing that just to spite you.
I see where Mozilla is coming from. They are looking at how many folks do not like being tracked and the popularity of programs like Adblock Plus, NoScript, etc...and are trying to add some of that functionality into the browser. Not a bad idea as there are significant numbers of folks who do not put any enhancements into their Firefox install other than some dumb toolbar. As Firefox will appeal to more and more non-technical types there would be some benefit to adding that functionality up front.
You can bet that the IE crowd will say that their browser works better and only compare the base load of Firefox.
The "do not track" header is a fine idea but it will only work for those sites that play by the rules.
Most don't.
Even with the additional "don't track header" capability I will not throw caution to the winds. I will continue to use Adblock Plus, NoScript and a few other tools.
It would be called lunathermal but yes, they think that the moon has at least a small molten core. The problem is that we are used to geothermal energy coming in some form of carrier (water) and in that regard the moon is a pretty dry place.
There are more than enough thermal differences between sun/shade on the moon that you would not need to go to the complexity of drilling a borehole to get to a hot spot. Just put it in direct sunlight and there is a few hundred degrees of difference.
A better bet might be to use a Carnot cycle engine (let's say with ammonia as a working fluid in a closed loop system, part in the shade, part in the sun). Or Peltier thermoelectric conversion (same hot/cold difference but with the direct conversion to DC electricity).
For human habitation the best bet is underground (the deeper the better) to stabilize the temperature extremes, shield from radiation and as a fine building material.
We have had a little bit of long term experience in operating machinery in a near vacuum (Mars) where odd things happen (solids that flow like fluids) and with bearing surfaces where conventional lubricants are fairly rare (other than the shuttle or the ISS).
A solar furnace on the moon would develop a tremendous amount of heat for smelting operations. The moon appears to have abundant resources like aluminum in the regolith but it may be harder to find iron (meteorite mining). Going to the moon will need to yield "something" that is more difficult to get or manufacture than on the earth. Finding that technology and the market for the products will be a big challenge.
I have worked for two companies that went down the same road. One started issuing all sorts of stock options, then they did a reverse 700:1 split and the new shares ended up going for about $3 each (originally they were as high as $38 a share before the split. At one time, during the.com boom it would have been around $2.24 million dollars in stock. After the reverse split the options were down to a total value of $257. They did re-issue new stock options at the revalued price, it was just an insult.
For seven years I worked the 50-60 hour weeks. Ended up with ulcers, heart problems, insomnia and some stress related disorders and on a laundry list of meds (I still take 12 prescriptions a day, eight years after I was finally laid off).
Seeing the doctor at the time I was taken aback when she said "just quit, no job is worth your life". It all made sense at the time, put in a few more years, exercise my options on a few million dollars and retire by age 40.
The second company just wanted more billable hours (consultant) as they could bill on the hours you put against a project. They just one day, unilaterally decided that our billable targets were set to 50 hours/week. Even working a 60 hour week you still lose hours when doing emails, phone calls, company motivational presentations and the obligatory after hour "social" get-togethers.
I tell ya, unless it is time with someone you really are in love with, after 50 hours a week the last thing you want to be doing is hanging out with the folks you work with.
Usually the folks who make these sorts of proclamations on "50 hour work weeks" have already been through a few divorces (because their job was way more of a priority than their families) and would not know what to do with their time if they were not at work. At this last company I was working a really long day, it was around 8 pm when I swung by the owners office to say good night to find him sitting there drinking Jack Daniels from a paper cup in his office. That is the type of life they wanted us to live. Only one priority in the world, work your ass off to make money for them. Not giving a damn about what your decisions mean to other people (probably why his wife dumped his ass too) and making all sorts of money so at your death you can have a viking funeral, burning on piles of $1 bills.
Jamming has been going on since the second day after radio was developed. New technologies are developed to adapt to jamming conditions, then jammers get more complex to go after the new tech.
I learned many jamming techniques and countermeasures in a few graduate level courses on receiver design back in the mid 80's. What was being done was very complex, and we were only exposed to the "SENSITIVE NOFOR" security classification of what was going on. "Gating" a radar was developed back in WWII, frequency hopping around the same time, same with spread spectrum. When we were learning the tech the jamming systems could detect and jump on a new frequency in a few milliseconds. Nowadays I bet those response times are in the tens of microseconds and cover everything from "DC to daylight".
The US government would spend $8 million dollars to develop one model of a particular jammer and not blink twice at a $50,000/ unit purchase price. This would have been news if there were three more zeros after the price tag.
The same problem applies to electroplating operations. If your electrolyte bath is not in perfect condition, if temperatures are not right, if the current is too high, etc... you will get a bad plating finish.
Batteries (lead, lithium, nickel-cadmium, carbon-zinc) all have the same problem. A certain percentage of the metals end up in a state that is useless for battery operation. This should not be a big surprise to anyone who understands the chemical processes.
Crowdsourcing may be great for evaluating the popularity of a particular statement but it has nothing to do with the truthfulness of any statement, ideology or belief. I cannot think of a worst way to evaluate the accuracy of any piece of data.
Since when did Hawking become the end-all, be-all font of all wisdom? Yes, he is a brilliant man who has more intellectual power in one lobe of his brain than most people have in their entire heads. He sells us his "Theory of Everything" as if there is a universal truth right around the corner and more recently has began to express his opinions on God and faith.
It is nihilistic of him to now proclaim that there is likely no universal set of rules that can apply to both the quantum and macroscopic world. It is as if he is ready to dismiss it all because the secrets have not been revealed to or by him. I think we need to book this guy as a judge on America's Got Talent as he has such a irrefutable claim on knowing what's right.
Maybe, just maybe, the universe is a lot more complicated than even he (or we) can conceive. In the twilight of his career Dr. Hawking has lost his sense of wonder with the universe and wants the toy box put up on the shelf in the garage.
Slashdot Mirror
ACARS has several component systems; some are common to all airlines and others are unique to each particular carrier. At its simplest form it provides very basic information regarding the status of a flight (takeoff, landing, gate departures and arrivals) and in-flight weather information (making each plane in to a temporary weather station).
Some air carriers use ACARS for much more comprehensive functions like monitoring the status of equipment on aircraft in flight (maintenance scheduling), passenger information or cargo requirements. Those carriers are going to be more susceptible to periods of high demand across bandwidth limited VHF frequencies or availability to a satellite uplink.
ACARS has become so useful that it is now hitting some limits because of the high demand for the functionality.
To Mr. Assange it is all about Mr. Assange. It has come down to his sexual misdeeds in Sweden and that they are not going to back down on his prosecution.
His life will be allot less fun if he was in a Swedish prison doing a few years for rape. Then he will just be another "common criminal" and not worth bytes to write articles about his latest proclamations.
That Ecuador was stuck with this guy is rather interesting[ Now they are stuck with him and I bet he is getting tired of eating cuy (guinea pig).
Usually people who get their panties in such a knot over personal scandals being revealed to the general public have a few skeletons in the closet.
Who wants to put money on the thought that maybe Lord Neuberger has more than a few "kinks" of his own. I wonder if he likes to dress up like a schoolgirl and get his ass paddled by a dominatrix.
There is more than one microphone on any voice recorder. There may be as many as five on some aircraft. Also, degrading the sound quality by lowering the data rate can mask other sounds that are even more critical than a flight crews last words.
I have been working with this technology for quite some time. Anything from Nirvana causes the bats to collide into a bloody mass over the cornfield.
The math all works out. Excessive use of this technology will result in an implosion of our Sun in 1x10-12 years.
THIS IS A TECHNOLOGY THAT MUST BE STOPPED! THE THREAT IS IMMINENT!
They could have injected it into Bowser's shorts. He would be walking really funny.
They ran out of Sun employees who were used for bear baiting.
It used to be that deviant behavior in physics involved "dirty dicking the 0-1 rod".
I am guilty of engineering a retrofit of lighting at a oil terminal to replace the long, yellow, low-pressure sodium lighting bulbs (400 watts) with 1500 watt HID lights.
The old light system was dim, with poor color rendition. The oil terminal could not do any work in the yard at night and it was difficult to detect a problem. (it was dark).
I went about in replacing all of the low pressure sodium lights with new 1500 watt, HID heads on the poles. Not being the one who was actually doing the wiring and never having gone back to that site at night, I did not know how bright it would be.
A year later I was flying into O'Hare airport (runway 14L) and looked out the passenger window. I saw this enormous white blur of lights about a mile away from the end of the runway. It was dazzling. Looking closer I recognized the layout of the oil terminal.
The installers put the fixtures on the poles but did not tilt them down enough. At least half the lighting was shining right into the eyes of the pilots on approach of 14L. I quickly asked our guys to tilt those damned lights down.
It was probably bright enough in the cockpit of the plane so they could have read a book while on approach.
I work in the electrical engineering field and have worked with a few other engineers who had been working as H1B workers.They did not have a particular talent or specialty that was lacking in any "domestic" engineer we had on staff. While I was friendly with the two engineers I knew of plenty of former classmates who were unemployed and equally (or more) qualified for the H1B position.
I never understood why the company I worked for went through such machinations to keep the two H1B engineers after they had laid off nearly twenty other engineers.
When employers are doing job reductions (layoffs) they should be required to re-justify why they laid off domestic workers vs. terminating H1B employees. This should be more than a single sentence about how this person has specialized skills that none of their American counterparts had.
The greatest fear should be internal contamination. Many of the radioactive isotopes mimic their non-radioactive elements or have a similar biological uptake. (Strontium vs. Calcium), (normal Iodine 127 vs. radioactive Iodine 131).
For dosage calculations it is important to know if it is an alpha particle, beta particle, gamma ray or neutron. Each has different penetrating capabilities and different destructive potential.
If I had a choice between 1 Sievert of gamma radiation given externally or 10 milliSieverts of an internal dose of Iodine 131 (8 day half life) or Polonium 210 (138 day half-life) I would take the external dose.
Polonium is a wicked producer of alpha particles. When ingested or inhaled it is toxic in addition to giving you a constant source of radiation (rate decreasing by 1/2 every 138 days).
I had a thyroid disorder and I opted for the Iodine 131 treatment instead of surgery. It was an internal contaminant and my sweat and urine were radioactive and I emitted enough radiation that I was supposed to stay away from people for several days (there are biological half-lives for elements in the body that are quite different from isotope decay half-lives). The treatment essentially "killed" my thyroid on purpose since it was on it's own version of a nuclear meltdown.
Need to consider external vs. internal, particle types, radiological half-life and biological half-life on any sort of dosage calculation.
Yes, such a purely hypothetical society would be filled with whack-jobs. Men who are afraid of women, men who treat women like chattel. Even the religions would get very warped.
Good thing there is no such society on THIS planet.
Opera does not kill applications, Apple kills applications
My take on "Guns don't kill people, people kill people"
Simply, SyFy is about as relevant to Science Fiction as the Home Shopping Network.
It just sucks ass. We used to watch 2-3 hours of Sci-Fi each night (Babylon 5, Farscape, Lexx, etc... ) now if I had a choice I would dump the channel completely.
Even the low rent UHF channels back in the mid 70's had more science fiction (The Spider, The Blob, Creature Features, etc...) What we have now is just embarrassing.
I am amazed that Sony is persisting in being a BUNCH OF JACKASSES. When I purchased a PS3 several years ago most of the appeal was the "Other OS" feature. Sure, I have bought my share of games (>20) and enjoy those too. Selling something (Other OS) and then taking it away makes many of us just think that Sony management is full of Mother-Fuc&ers.
Sony should be embracing the Other OS crowd and giving us more options to use the platform for high end computing.
Hey assholes, you made the news as a forward thinking company when you gave us the Other OS feature. Now you are making the news for being just as backwards and ignorant as Micro$oft.
What the result will be (for me) is that I will enjoy the games I have but will not spend another dime on PS3 games. Guess what, I am doing that just to spite you.
I see where Mozilla is coming from. They are looking at how many folks do not like being tracked and the popularity of programs like Adblock Plus, NoScript, etc...and are trying to add some of that functionality into the browser. Not a bad idea as there are significant numbers of folks who do not put any enhancements into their Firefox install other than some dumb toolbar. As Firefox will appeal to more and more non-technical types there would be some benefit to adding that functionality up front.
You can bet that the IE crowd will say that their browser works better and only compare the base load of Firefox.
The "do not track" header is a fine idea but it will only work for those sites that play by the rules.
Most don't.
Even with the additional "don't track header" capability I will not throw caution to the winds. I will continue to use Adblock Plus, NoScript and a few other tools.
It would be called lunathermal but yes, they think that the moon has at least a small molten core. The problem is that we are used to geothermal energy coming in some form of carrier (water) and in that regard the moon is a pretty dry place. There are more than enough thermal differences between sun/shade on the moon that you would not need to go to the complexity of drilling a borehole to get to a hot spot. Just put it in direct sunlight and there is a few hundred degrees of difference. A better bet might be to use a Carnot cycle engine (let's say with ammonia as a working fluid in a closed loop system, part in the shade, part in the sun). Or Peltier thermoelectric conversion (same hot/cold difference but with the direct conversion to DC electricity). For human habitation the best bet is underground (the deeper the better) to stabilize the temperature extremes, shield from radiation and as a fine building material. We have had a little bit of long term experience in operating machinery in a near vacuum (Mars) where odd things happen (solids that flow like fluids) and with bearing surfaces where conventional lubricants are fairly rare (other than the shuttle or the ISS). A solar furnace on the moon would develop a tremendous amount of heat for smelting operations. The moon appears to have abundant resources like aluminum in the regolith but it may be harder to find iron (meteorite mining). Going to the moon will need to yield "something" that is more difficult to get or manufacture than on the earth. Finding that technology and the market for the products will be a big challenge.
I have worked for two companies that went down the same road. One started issuing all sorts of stock options, then they did a reverse 700:1 split and the new shares ended up going for about $3 each (originally they were as high as $38 a share before the split. At one time, during the.com boom it would have been around $2.24 million dollars in stock. After the reverse split the options were down to a total value of $257. They did re-issue new stock options at the revalued price, it was just an insult.
For seven years I worked the 50-60 hour weeks. Ended up with ulcers, heart problems, insomnia and some stress related disorders and on a laundry list of meds (I still take 12 prescriptions a day, eight years after I was finally laid off).
Seeing the doctor at the time I was taken aback when she said "just quit, no job is worth your life". It all made sense at the time, put in a few more years, exercise my options on a few million dollars and retire by age 40.
The second company just wanted more billable hours (consultant) as they could bill on the hours you put against a project. They just one day, unilaterally decided that our billable targets were set to 50 hours/week. Even working a 60 hour week you still lose hours when doing emails, phone calls, company motivational presentations and the obligatory after hour "social" get-togethers.
I tell ya, unless it is time with someone you really are in love with, after 50 hours a week the last thing you want to be doing is hanging out with the folks you work with.
Usually the folks who make these sorts of proclamations on "50 hour work weeks" have already been through a few divorces (because their job was way more of a priority than their families) and would not know what to do with their time if they were not at work. At this last company I was working a really long day, it was around 8 pm when I swung by the owners office to say good night to find him sitting there drinking Jack Daniels from a paper cup in his office. That is the type of life they wanted us to live. Only one priority in the world, work your ass off to make money for them. Not giving a damn about what your decisions mean to other people (probably why his wife dumped his ass too) and making all sorts of money so at your death you can have a viking funeral, burning on piles of $1 bills.
I have worked with EPB on some other comms projects. Their system is fiber to the home.
Jamming has been going on since the second day after radio was developed. New technologies are developed to adapt to jamming conditions, then jammers get more complex to go after the new tech.
I learned many jamming techniques and countermeasures in a few graduate level courses on receiver design back in the mid 80's. What was being done was very complex, and we were only exposed to the "SENSITIVE NOFOR" security classification of what was going on. "Gating" a radar was developed back in WWII, frequency hopping around the same time, same with spread spectrum. When we were learning the tech the jamming systems could detect and jump on a new frequency in a few milliseconds. Nowadays I bet those response times are in the tens of microseconds and cover everything from "DC to daylight".
The US government would spend $8 million dollars to develop one model of a particular jammer and not blink twice at a $50,000/ unit purchase price. This would have been news if there were three more zeros after the price tag.
I would rather take the folks on death row and vivisect them for spare parts. If a death row convict makes it to space it will be as a spare kidney.
The same problem applies to electroplating operations. If your electrolyte bath is not in perfect condition, if temperatures are not right, if the current is too high, etc... you will get a bad plating finish.
Batteries (lead, lithium, nickel-cadmium, carbon-zinc) all have the same problem. A certain percentage of the metals end up in a state that is useless for battery operation. This should not be a big surprise to anyone who understands the chemical processes.
Crowdsourcing may be great for evaluating the popularity of a particular statement but it has nothing to do with the truthfulness of any statement, ideology or belief. I cannot think of a worst way to evaluate the accuracy of any piece of data.
Since when did Hawking become the end-all, be-all font of all wisdom? Yes, he is a brilliant man who has more intellectual power in one lobe of his brain than most people have in their entire heads. He sells us his "Theory of Everything" as if there is a universal truth right around the corner and more recently has began to express his opinions on God and faith.
It is nihilistic of him to now proclaim that there is likely no universal set of rules that can apply to both the quantum and macroscopic world. It is as if he is ready to dismiss it all because the secrets have not been revealed to or by him. I think we need to book this guy as a judge on America's Got Talent as he has such a irrefutable claim on knowing what's right.
Maybe, just maybe, the universe is a lot more complicated than even he (or we) can conceive. In the twilight of his career Dr. Hawking has lost his sense of wonder with the universe and wants the toy box put up on the shelf in the garage.