It sucks big-time to have your car looking like a grotesque piece of $50,000 modern art, but seeing your kid getting safely out: priceless!
In the theme of the credit card commercial you quote from, it would probably be a pretty wise investment for you to head out to the local flying school, plunk down a couple bucks, and sit thru the groundschool section called 'airmanship'. It'll be money well spent, and probably save you an airframe or two from the sounds of the accident list.
The sooner OPEC switches to the Euro and isolation of the US world bully begins, the better IMHO
That process started in 2000. The one country that made the switch, was promptly invaded, and now has it's entire oil ifrastructure sitting in ruins. This was a major warning shot fired at the rest of the oil producers in the region. Listen very carefully to the news, in particular about those countries still looking to make the switch, and sell thier oil for euros. There's constant mentions from the us administration calling them various labels, that all boil down to 'terrorist supporter'. These are thinly veiled threats that basically say, if you make the switch to pricing oil in euro's like Iraq did, you will be next.
Thats the funny bit, Americans think they are free, fantasy is something they are good at its the reality they have trouble with....
Thats not a problem anymore, haven't you seen how they have re-defined reality. Create a fantasy on a tv show, fill it up with stupid political head games, and label it 'reality show'.
There is a reason why physically learning to drive a car can take a couple of hours while learning to fly a plane can take hundreds.
You are quite wrong here. I just dug out my first logbook to check, it shows 7.2 hours of instruction before I flew on my own the first time. Way back when I was teaching, I seem to remember the average ran around 8 to 10 hours of instruction prior to folks flying solo. I've filled 5 logbooks since then, so I think I've had just a _little_ exposure to both the airplanes and the cars.
To keep the comparison valid, when comparing cars and planes, you must limit the airplane example to your average small single engine 4 seat aircraft. Typically, they are as easy to fly as a car is to drive.
To fully put it in perspective, where I live, it takes 2 years to get an unrestricted drivers license today. That's a LOT of hands on driving experience from 'initial learner' till you finally get the full privileges of a drivers license. I can still take a person with zero exposure to airplanes, teach them to fly, achieve 'first solo' in 8 to 10 hours of instruction, and they can have a full license after 35 hours of combined instruction and solo practise. At least half of the instruction actually deals with things like properly handling air traffic control, and other legal regulatory requirements. Flying a small single engine 4 seater akin to a Cessna 172 is dirt simple, and really the only thing different from driving is teaching somebody to think in 3 dimensions instead of 2, as well as learning the co-ordination required when landing, ie the transition from flying to driving.
What takes hundreds of hours of training, is teaching folks to upgrade to flying advanced aircraft, with much higher speeds and capabilities, along with complex systems to manage. this is an option that's just not available to folks driving cars, you cant just upgrade from your basic ford, buy a F-1 race machine and take it out on the highway. When you step from a Cessna 172 into a modern lear, you are stepping up to a vehicle that's much faster, and far more complex than a formula 1 race car.
Would you care when one of those morons built a rocket that came apart, killing everyone on board and raining down debris? You would certainly complain bitterly if it was one of your family on board, or if it was your house that was hit by debris.
My family is bright enough to make thier own decisions. They would evaluate the vehicle, and if they thought the risk/reward was worth it, they'd make the trip. If they died in the process, well, we'd have a funeral, express our sorrows, and acknowledge that a family member died trying to do something out of the ordinary, with an element of risk, a risk they chose to accept. We'd probably invite the builders of the device to the wake, make sure they fully understood that we know about risk, and our family member accepted the risks, so there is absolutely NO FEAR of a lawsuit from us. This whole concept of regulating everything in existence to the point where Joe Stupid is totally protected from himself is just silly and stupid. Humanity spent 15,000 years working to breed stupidity out of the race, government regulation for 4 generations has totally defeated 15,000 years of effort. If people are dumb enough to go kill themselves stupidly, it's good for the gene pool, hopefully they do it at a young age, before the genes propogate.
As for the fear of parts raining down from the sky from a failed vehicle, so far, Nasa is the only one doing that, and that's only because they are stupid enough to choose a re-entry trajectory that puts the shuttle over heavily populated areas during the highest risk portion of the re-entry. This is because they want to land in florida, not on the west coast. In the aviation industry, this is referred to as 'get-home-itis', and it's the major contributor to aviation accidents, a flight crew that wants to get home, no matter what.
The FAA has more than enough regulations covering the operation of vehicles from ground level to 60,000 feet. Since it's kind of impossible to do a launch and re-entry without going thru this area of airspace, there's plenty of regulations already in place to cover it. There's no need to generate yet another set of rules covering these vehicles, there's already far to many sets with overlapping jurasdiction in place.
The map is humorous, even if the tracks it plots are factually in error.
What it's really showing though is, now we can rest assured most floridians can count to 3. There's still plenty of time before the election, bet mother nature and god team up to ensure they can count a little higher by election day, and then we wont see another fiasco like the last go around.
This is not a popular opinion here on/., and surely to attract the negative mods, but, that doesn't mean it's not true. The reality is, SS1 and the sub orbital flights are the first time most folks here have ever heard of Mr Rutan and Scaled. A few more will remember Voyageur and it's round the world trip. There's only a few that will even recognize things like the BD-10, the Pond Racer, and numerous other attempts at high speed aircraft by Mr Rutan. There is a common theme amongst all of his attempts at high speed equipment in the past, they all killed the test pilots. BD-10 in particular got a number of them before they finally decided, there was no way to strengthen the tail and actually have it survive the transonic speed range.
Another brilliant example folks love to point at, is the Beech Starship. I've had the pleasure of riding in one once, it was pretty 'different'. Then again, I also know, after Raytheon bought Beech, they actually started buying all the Starships back. They felt it was cheaper to buy the airframes back from the owners, and scrap them, than to assume the product liability for the aircraft in the field. Not exactly a vote of confidence for the design, and actually held up in industry today as a huge example to new upcoming engineers, and its NOT held up in a posotive light.
The thing about meticulous flight testing, you depart on a planned flight profile, fly the profile, then analyze the data. SS1 has been on a meticulous program since the inception. The first flight to 100km resulted in an uncommanded, and uncontrollable roll event. Data was analyzed, and changes made. Months later, the second flight results in a much more dramatic unplanned roll event. A second flight is scheduled for a few days later. This is a MAJOR departure from the meticulous and well orchestrated flight test program. The flight on Monday is 'for the money', there is no doubt. If it was truely an extension of a meticulous flight test program, it would be delayed until the unplanned roll event was fully understood, and efforts were made to prevent it. Two major unplanned events in 2 consecutive flights does require a revisit of the issues prior to making another flight, unless of course, you have the clock ticking, and want to shoot for the money/glory. then you just step back and say 'damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead' for one more flight.
Kudos to Mellville tho, he stepped up to the microphone and said 'my fault' when it was needed. It puts a plastic facade on the 'flight test program' again, and allows them to launch on monday, to go for the bucks.
I'd like to see them succeed on monday, it'll be GREAT for the industry as a whole.
Some great videos there, i think some of the other launches are actually better than the SS1 stuff.
You should fire off a resume to Scaled. They seem to have adaquate expertise in the aerospace field, but they have recently turned into a company that's trolling for publicity. I understand they need a new web infrastructure in place by monday, as they have a small publicity event scheduled for then, and it's likely to generate more videos that will melt thier servers again.
Vor strait in limits are typically 400 feet, it is the standard to which non precision approaches are designed for strait in, obstacles allowing. Circling is 500. Limits above these levels are normally due to obstacles in the local geography. NDB approaches (ya I know, most of you americans dont even know what those are) tend to have higher limits because they have larger allowances for tracking errors, and tend to be located in areas with serious terrain issues. I dont have a full set of jeps handy to list off a few hundred, but I do have CAP 2 at my desk. The first non precision set of approaches in it that are not in moutainous terrain are located at Boundary Bay. The GPS limits are 315 and the VOR limits are 415 feet. There are no precision approaches available. I've done my share of arrivals there late at nite (its where one of our planes is hangared), and have popped out at 500 or lower MANY times on that arrival. 500 foot ceilings are a normal condition here in the winter. Overcast, drizzle, and low ceilings, that's the winter in the pacific northwest.
As for the ice, well, I'm on the BC west coast. Ice is a normal every day part of flying all winter. Folks in our part of the world often chuckle at the fear most pilots have of ice. When its something you deal with every day, you quickly learn the limits of your aircraft, and it's not a big deal anymore. If you are flying the KingAir, you pay attention. If you are flying the lear, well, you take the attitude 'ice, is it time to go serve drinks already?'.
I would disagree on the tbm tho, it's not barely adaquate, it's totally inadaquate. then again, I'm old school, i've come home with a pt-6 shut down enough times to know, I dont ever want to fly in a single engine airplane, except low level vfr, where they can be a LOT of fun. If i'm off to work, it's got to have at least 2 powerplants, or I dont want to fly it. But there's one nice thing about wearing the hat that says 'Chief Pilot', I do get to pick and choose what/when I fly, rank has it's privileges.
Just amazes me, policies that have been in place for 30+ years, based on experience, and now folks are gushing about how they are 'because of terrorists'. Airlines that have a 'different meals' policy have had so for many many years, long before terrorists came into the scene. The part that may surprise you, not that many airlines actually have the policy, and most dont need it. The policy is only needed if you actually serve meals to the crew. Take a look at your average domestic flights today, the flight crew brown bags it, if they eat at all.
The goal of terrorism is to scare a population to the point they are scared of thier own shadows. 9/11 did not accomplish that goal. Department of Homeland Security has done a good job of building on the foundation of 9/11, and the goal seems to be fully accomplished these days. Cant read a thread here on/. anymore without somebody being scared of how the terrorist angle fits with the particular story. Cant turn the TV on without hearing some news commentators talking about terrorists, and virtually every 'in production' series now has regular references to terrorists.
When the folks were planning out the 9/11 attack, I'm pretty sure that not even in thier wildest dreams had they considered the concept, the american government would create a department as big as the military to continue thier work. But, it happened, and the population is properly scared now, and washington even has a properly dumbed down delivery system now where they can advise the population just how scared they should be at any point in time, with color codes to accomodate those that cant comprehend a numbered system that uses numbers between 1 and 10.
I am not sure when the last time a commercial flight in the USA had a navigator was, but, well, it was a heck of a while ago
I believe it was the days of the pan-am clippers. Remember, the big flying boats going across the pacific? I believe they were the last to use navigators in scheduled civilian service.
In all the years I've been flying, navigation was always a pilot responsibility. In 2 crew environment, it's normally delegated to the pilot not flying. On more modern equipment, that basically boils down to programming the computer systems, but that's only a very recent innovation. The exception has been when flying in usa airspace, there, it's really easy. You can sluff that off on to atc, seems the only way anybody flies in the usa is by asking for radar vectors to destination. It's actually quite hillarious listening to some of them on the radio when they get into a non radar environment. You can hear the panic in thier voice after the controllers tells them 'you are leaving radar coverage, radar service terminated, have a nice flight'.
In real life, the vast majority of aircraft actually fly with a 2 crew cockpit. There are still a few civilian types flying that have a 3 crew cockpit (747, 727 come to mind immediately). The third crew position is the flight engineer. 25 years in the industry, I've never flown in an environment where the fe was qualified to fly the aircraft. It's a low paying junior position with most companies, typically staffed by a green pilot that's got virtually no flight experience, and (s)he has been rushed thru a flight engineer course for the airplane. A pilots license is not required for the position, only a flight engineer license, which is complicated enough to obtain, they may as well issue them in cracker jack boxes. In some companies, the fe position is actually staffed by the maintanence department, and it's the most senior maintanence engineer position, a completely 'non flying' crew member. They are responsible for dealing with 'minor snags' when the aircraft is away from base, and they fly 'with toolbox'.
The last time I saw an aircraft with a navigator position, it was a C-130 in military colors. In the military, navigator positions are normally filled by folks that wash out of pilot training, that's typically a quick ticket to navigator school. They are most definitely NOT qualified to fly the aircraft.
The cockpit is a red light environment at night, to keep the pilots night vision sharp. On the descent, you often go thru clouds. The light scatter on the cloud from the cabin lights is enough to affect the pilots night vision and hence depth perception. This is the same reason you turn off all the wing strobes when going thru clouds.
It's not such a big deal these days when going into a large modern airport, there's a lot more light scatter from the approach lights/strobes, but it is important landing at smaller airports that dont have high intensity approach lights and runway strobes. But, in typical fashion, the rule was written into the regulations decades ago as a 'passenger safety' thing, and it's never been revised to reflect modern realities. So, as long as the regulations state that airplanes will put out cabin lights during the landing phase, it will continue to happen.
During the winter I regularily make instrument approaches into large and small airports at night. When you come out of the clouds at 500 feet, about a mile back from the runway, and it's pitch dark with no stars/moon for reference due to the low overcast, your depth perception will be totally destroyed if you have not been dilligent in keeping the low light environment in the cockpit. That makes a landing on a runway that has runway lights, but no approach lights, very very difficult, and potentially dangerous. You have to make the transition from focussing on an instrument panel that's 2 feet in front of you, to focussing on low intensity light points that are 1 mile ahead, and you have anywhere from 20 to 30 seconds to fully transition, keeping in mind the lights are approaching at 120 knots. Add the light scatter you get from the aircraft itself reflecting on raindrops, and its a very disorienting situation. It's very normal to leave landing lights off in this scenario, because the light scatter from the landing light does more harm than good.
The bottom line, for a modern large airport with high intensity approach lights and runway strobes operational, it's all academic. But when there's no HIAL and no strobes on the ground, with a runway lit up at low intensity, and a light rain falling, the difference is HUGE.
Granted, we've made significant accomplishments in space travel since then, and the cost per shuttle mission is surely less (I seem to recall around $10 million per, but I can't find any numbers).
When the shuttle was proposed, that was the big selling feature, a cost of $10 million per trip. In reality, the cost of a shuttle mission today is around 500 million, so in pro-rated dollars, about half the cost of an apollo moon shot. hmmm, I wonder what has more value, an apollo mission to the moon, or 2 shuttle trips to low orbit.....
And finally, when the heck were space programs within on close to their budget? 88 million? More like 500-900 million $.
You are confusing american programs with indian programs. Just because an american program has to run over budget by an order of magnitude, doesn't mean everybody does it that way. And, since this is an unmanned mission, it's quite possible they have actually got a good handle on the issues. Heck, the rovers went to mars on budget, and that was Nasa, the king of 'lets see how much money we can burn and get nothing for it'.
The trick is convincing them that the US is the best place to explore their full potential.
This may have been true in the past, but, for a foreign company looking to do business of just about any kind, the usa is nothing but a legal minefield full of lawyers trying to score a fast buck. Much better off to do all the development and production back home, the sell the end product to the 200 million consumers. for a space launch business, there's plenty of places in the world where details like launch permits etc can be arranged in a few hours, if they are even required at all. The usa is a beaurocratic nightmare, probably the worst country in the world to try do such things.
What will be interesting to see if they can come up with a vehicle that could rendevous with the ISS; the orbit really was poorly chosen for jeverybody except for Russians.
The orbit was chosen as one that can be equally attained from the russian launch facilities, and the american launch facilities. I keep hearing here on/. how bad an orbit it is. In case you haven't noticed, there's been no launches over at the KSC to the iss, and ALL of the supplies/crew are coming out of the russian launch facilities. If it was in a lower inclination orbit, the ISS would be effectively lost right now, because america doesn't have the stomach to take the risk of launching shuttles anymore.
The high inclination orbit saved the iss project when the american shuttle program came to a crashing halt. In a lower inclination, the progress resupply vehicles would not have the capacity required to keep the ISS supplied.
Reaching ISS could seriously be the next challenge.
It is the next financial bonanza for the first company that can do it, they can bid against the russians to do launches for Nasa, who has demonstrated over the last couple of years, they are incapable of reaching the ISS. Thankfully, it's in a high enough inclination that a progress launched out of russia can carry a significant payload for resupply.
Microsoft gives free pc's to entire school systems when its part of the terms of settlement of a class action law suit. The courts determine a minimum payment level for proceeds of the class suit, and when the actual claims of the class participants dont meet that level, the balance goes to charitable things like buying pc's for schools. This has happened in california twice that I know of, and probably in other states as well.
As for the google folks, well, they've had the ipo proceeds for a month now, which in reality are probably still mostly tied up in investment banker accounts awaiting various releases and transfers. It took Billy 20 years and the aquisition of a wife before he actually started doing any serious philanthropy. Come back in 20 years, see how Google fits into the corporate landscape, or if it even still exists, and then look at what the founders did after they had some time to adjust to the concepts of having hundreds of millions of dollars kicking around.
you are trying to use ipv6 on an ipv4 network. Not gonna work till the whole internet has all the plumbing replaced with ipv6 capable equipment. That's not gonna happen till there is a need. A bunch of folks whining about 'no ipv6 support' is not a need. Show a good solid profitable business case, and the net will switch overnite. Till then, ipv4 seems to be doing the job just fine...
IPV6 was an issue, back in the days when folks still believed every machine should be directly accessible. Nat was invented as a work-around. It turns out, in the network world of today, NAT provides tremendous benefit in preventing external attacks from reaching the internal network.
NAT was a workaround to a percieved problem, exhaustion of ipv4 address space. Now that the trend is to only have a couple ipv4 entry points to the typical lan, and have the rest of the lan in private ip space anyways, the problem doesn't exist as folks percieved it would.
IPV6 was a solution to a problem, but, the internet did what the internet was supposed to do, it found an immediate solution, and NAT became the de facto cure for address space exhaustion. In essence, the internet routed around the problem, long before the 'proper' cure became widespread. To most commercial bandwidth providers, IPV6 is more of a problem than a solution, it means expensive upgrades to expensive equipment. Not gonna happen as long as the combination of IPv4 + NAT can do the trick.
Lots of folks are under the mistaken impression that a/. attack takes out servers. It rarely does that. What it does do, is totally flood the incoming/outgoing network pipe. If your server is on the far side of a t-1 or equivalent connection, the connection doesn't stand a chance, and the episode ends up being just like a distributed syn flood, all the incoming connections, but not enough bandwidth to deliver the responses. *nix boxes tend to survive fine, some flavours of windows boxes will do the bsod in this case, tcpip stack blows buffers in ring0 driver code. OTOH, if you are sitting in a data center with a 100 mbit connection to the upstream router, which has gigabit feeds to the internet, you should have no problem withstanding the onslaught of the/. crowd.
I will admit, on a new server, this is a pretty slick trick to stress test the whole system. Just suggest nudie pics available to the/. crowd, sit back, and watch to see if the upstream routers can deal with the loads. It's a far better way to see if your upstream providers have problems than sitting back and waiting till there's real business/money on the line. I've got a new load balanced cluster going live for a client in a couple weeks, probly gonna steal a page from your book here, I've always known the/. test was a good one, never thought to spice the blurb with the hint of nudie pics.
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In the theme of the credit card commercial you quote from, it would probably be a pretty wise investment for you to head out to the local flying school, plunk down a couple bucks, and sit thru the groundschool section called 'airmanship'. It'll be money well spent, and probably save you an airframe or two from the sounds of the accident list.
That process started in 2000. The one country that made the switch, was promptly invaded, and now has it's entire oil ifrastructure sitting in ruins. This was a major warning shot fired at the rest of the oil producers in the region. Listen very carefully to the news, in particular about those countries still looking to make the switch, and sell thier oil for euros. There's constant mentions from the us administration calling them various labels, that all boil down to 'terrorist supporter'. These are thinly veiled threats that basically say, if you make the switch to pricing oil in euro's like Iraq did, you will be next.
Thats not a problem anymore, haven't you seen how they have re-defined reality. Create a fantasy on a tv show, fill it up with stupid political head games, and label it 'reality show'.
You are quite wrong here. I just dug out my first logbook to check, it shows 7.2 hours of instruction before I flew on my own the first time. Way back when I was teaching, I seem to remember the average ran around 8 to 10 hours of instruction prior to folks flying solo. I've filled 5 logbooks since then, so I think I've had just a _little_ exposure to both the airplanes and the cars.
To keep the comparison valid, when comparing cars and planes, you must limit the airplane example to your average small single engine 4 seat aircraft. Typically, they are as easy to fly as a car is to drive.
To fully put it in perspective, where I live, it takes 2 years to get an unrestricted drivers license today. That's a LOT of hands on driving experience from 'initial learner' till you finally get the full privileges of a drivers license. I can still take a person with zero exposure to airplanes, teach them to fly, achieve 'first solo' in 8 to 10 hours of instruction, and they can have a full license after 35 hours of combined instruction and solo practise. At least half of the instruction actually deals with things like properly handling air traffic control, and other legal regulatory requirements. Flying a small single engine 4 seater akin to a Cessna 172 is dirt simple, and really the only thing different from driving is teaching somebody to think in 3 dimensions instead of 2, as well as learning the co-ordination required when landing, ie the transition from flying to driving.
What takes hundreds of hours of training, is teaching folks to upgrade to flying advanced aircraft, with much higher speeds and capabilities, along with complex systems to manage. this is an option that's just not available to folks driving cars, you cant just upgrade from your basic ford, buy a F-1 race machine and take it out on the highway. When you step from a Cessna 172 into a modern lear, you are stepping up to a vehicle that's much faster, and far more complex than a formula 1 race car.
My family is bright enough to make thier own decisions. They would evaluate the vehicle, and if they thought the risk/reward was worth it, they'd make the trip. If they died in the process, well, we'd have a funeral, express our sorrows, and acknowledge that a family member died trying to do something out of the ordinary, with an element of risk, a risk they chose to accept. We'd probably invite the builders of the device to the wake, make sure they fully understood that we know about risk, and our family member accepted the risks, so there is absolutely NO FEAR of a lawsuit from us. This whole concept of regulating everything in existence to the point where Joe Stupid is totally protected from himself is just silly and stupid. Humanity spent 15,000 years working to breed stupidity out of the race, government regulation for 4 generations has totally defeated 15,000 years of effort. If people are dumb enough to go kill themselves stupidly, it's good for the gene pool, hopefully they do it at a young age, before the genes propogate.
As for the fear of parts raining down from the sky from a failed vehicle, so far, Nasa is the only one doing that, and that's only because they are stupid enough to choose a re-entry trajectory that puts the shuttle over heavily populated areas during the highest risk portion of the re-entry. This is because they want to land in florida, not on the west coast. In the aviation industry, this is referred to as 'get-home-itis', and it's the major contributor to aviation accidents, a flight crew that wants to get home, no matter what.
The FAA has more than enough regulations covering the operation of vehicles from ground level to 60,000 feet. Since it's kind of impossible to do a launch and re-entry without going thru this area of airspace, there's plenty of regulations already in place to cover it. There's no need to generate yet another set of rules covering these vehicles, there's already far to many sets with overlapping jurasdiction in place.
What it's really showing though is, now we can rest assured most floridians can count to 3. There's still plenty of time before the election, bet mother nature and god team up to ensure they can count a little higher by election day, and then we wont see another fiasco like the last go around.
This is not a popular opinion here on /., and surely to attract the negative mods, but, that doesn't mean it's not true. The reality is, SS1 and the sub orbital flights are the first time most folks here have ever heard of Mr Rutan and Scaled. A few more will remember Voyageur and it's round the world trip. There's only a few that will even recognize things like the BD-10, the Pond Racer, and numerous other attempts at high speed aircraft by Mr Rutan. There is a common theme amongst all of his attempts at high speed equipment in the past, they all killed the test pilots. BD-10 in particular got a number of them before they finally decided, there was no way to strengthen the tail and actually have it survive the transonic speed range.
Another brilliant example folks love to point at, is the Beech Starship. I've had the pleasure of riding in one once, it was pretty 'different'. Then again, I also know, after Raytheon bought Beech, they actually started buying all the Starships back. They felt it was cheaper to buy the airframes back from the owners, and scrap them, than to assume the product liability for the aircraft in the field. Not exactly a vote of confidence for the design, and actually held up in industry today as a huge example to new upcoming engineers, and its NOT held up in a posotive light.
The thing about meticulous flight testing, you depart on a planned flight profile, fly the profile, then analyze the data. SS1 has been on a meticulous program since the inception. The first flight to 100km resulted in an uncommanded, and uncontrollable roll event. Data was analyzed, and changes made. Months later, the second flight results in a much more dramatic unplanned roll event. A second flight is scheduled for a few days later. This is a MAJOR departure from the meticulous and well orchestrated flight test program. The flight on Monday is 'for the money', there is no doubt. If it was truely an extension of a meticulous flight test program, it would be delayed until the unplanned roll event was fully understood, and efforts were made to prevent it. Two major unplanned events in 2 consecutive flights does require a revisit of the issues prior to making another flight, unless of course, you have the clock ticking, and want to shoot for the money/glory. then you just step back and say 'damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead' for one more flight.
Kudos to Mellville tho, he stepped up to the microphone and said 'my fault' when it was needed. It puts a plastic facade on the 'flight test program' again, and allows them to launch on monday, to go for the bucks.
I'd like to see them succeed on monday, it'll be GREAT for the industry as a whole.
You should fire off a resume to Scaled. They seem to have adaquate expertise in the aerospace field, but they have recently turned into a company that's trolling for publicity. I understand they need a new web infrastructure in place by monday, as they have a small publicity event scheduled for then, and it's likely to generate more videos that will melt thier servers again.
As for the ice, well, I'm on the BC west coast. Ice is a normal every day part of flying all winter. Folks in our part of the world often chuckle at the fear most pilots have of ice. When its something you deal with every day, you quickly learn the limits of your aircraft, and it's not a big deal anymore. If you are flying the KingAir, you pay attention. If you are flying the lear, well, you take the attitude 'ice, is it time to go serve drinks already?'.
I would disagree on the tbm tho, it's not barely adaquate, it's totally inadaquate. then again, I'm old school, i've come home with a pt-6 shut down enough times to know, I dont ever want to fly in a single engine airplane, except low level vfr, where they can be a LOT of fun. If i'm off to work, it's got to have at least 2 powerplants, or I dont want to fly it. But there's one nice thing about wearing the hat that says 'Chief Pilot', I do get to pick and choose what/when I fly, rank has it's privileges.
The goal of terrorism is to scare a population to the point they are scared of thier own shadows. 9/11 did not accomplish that goal. Department of Homeland Security has done a good job of building on the foundation of 9/11, and the goal seems to be fully accomplished these days. Cant read a thread here on /. anymore without somebody being scared of how the terrorist angle fits with the particular story. Cant turn the TV on without hearing some news commentators talking about terrorists, and virtually every 'in production' series now has regular references to terrorists.
When the folks were planning out the 9/11 attack, I'm pretty sure that not even in thier wildest dreams had they considered the concept, the american government would create a department as big as the military to continue thier work. But, it happened, and the population is properly scared now, and washington even has a properly dumbed down delivery system now where they can advise the population just how scared they should be at any point in time, with color codes to accomodate those that cant comprehend a numbered system that uses numbers between 1 and 10.
I believe it was the days of the pan-am clippers. Remember, the big flying boats going across the pacific? I believe they were the last to use navigators in scheduled civilian service.
In all the years I've been flying, navigation was always a pilot responsibility. In 2 crew environment, it's normally delegated to the pilot not flying. On more modern equipment, that basically boils down to programming the computer systems, but that's only a very recent innovation. The exception has been when flying in usa airspace, there, it's really easy. You can sluff that off on to atc, seems the only way anybody flies in the usa is by asking for radar vectors to destination. It's actually quite hillarious listening to some of them on the radio when they get into a non radar environment. You can hear the panic in thier voice after the controllers tells them 'you are leaving radar coverage, radar service terminated, have a nice flight'.
The last time I saw an aircraft with a navigator position, it was a C-130 in military colors. In the military, navigator positions are normally filled by folks that wash out of pilot training, that's typically a quick ticket to navigator school. They are most definitely NOT qualified to fly the aircraft.
It's not such a big deal these days when going into a large modern airport, there's a lot more light scatter from the approach lights/strobes, but it is important landing at smaller airports that dont have high intensity approach lights and runway strobes. But, in typical fashion, the rule was written into the regulations decades ago as a 'passenger safety' thing, and it's never been revised to reflect modern realities. So, as long as the regulations state that airplanes will put out cabin lights during the landing phase, it will continue to happen.
During the winter I regularily make instrument approaches into large and small airports at night. When you come out of the clouds at 500 feet, about a mile back from the runway, and it's pitch dark with no stars/moon for reference due to the low overcast, your depth perception will be totally destroyed if you have not been dilligent in keeping the low light environment in the cockpit. That makes a landing on a runway that has runway lights, but no approach lights, very very difficult, and potentially dangerous. You have to make the transition from focussing on an instrument panel that's 2 feet in front of you, to focussing on low intensity light points that are 1 mile ahead, and you have anywhere from 20 to 30 seconds to fully transition, keeping in mind the lights are approaching at 120 knots. Add the light scatter you get from the aircraft itself reflecting on raindrops, and its a very disorienting situation. It's very normal to leave landing lights off in this scenario, because the light scatter from the landing light does more harm than good.
The bottom line, for a modern large airport with high intensity approach lights and runway strobes operational, it's all academic. But when there's no HIAL and no strobes on the ground, with a runway lit up at low intensity, and a light rain falling, the difference is HUGE.
Unless you happen to live in Hawaii, where it's even more common than earthquakes in california.
When the shuttle was proposed, that was the big selling feature, a cost of $10 million per trip. In reality, the cost of a shuttle mission today is around 500 million, so in pro-rated dollars, about half the cost of an apollo moon shot. hmmm, I wonder what has more value, an apollo mission to the moon, or 2 shuttle trips to low orbit.....
Highly unlikely. You see, they probably know how to learn from the mistakes of others, and american teams have already done this one...
You are confusing american programs with indian programs. Just because an american program has to run over budget by an order of magnitude, doesn't mean everybody does it that way. And, since this is an unmanned mission, it's quite possible they have actually got a good handle on the issues. Heck, the rovers went to mars on budget, and that was Nasa, the king of 'lets see how much money we can burn and get nothing for it'.
This may have been true in the past, but, for a foreign company looking to do business of just about any kind, the usa is nothing but a legal minefield full of lawyers trying to score a fast buck. Much better off to do all the development and production back home, the sell the end product to the 200 million consumers. for a space launch business, there's plenty of places in the world where details like launch permits etc can be arranged in a few hours, if they are even required at all. The usa is a beaurocratic nightmare, probably the worst country in the world to try do such things.
The orbit was chosen as one that can be equally attained from the russian launch facilities, and the american launch facilities. I keep hearing here on /. how bad an orbit it is. In case you haven't noticed, there's been no launches over at the KSC to the iss, and ALL of the supplies/crew are coming out of the russian launch facilities. If it was in a lower inclination orbit, the ISS would be effectively lost right now, because america doesn't have the stomach to take the risk of launching shuttles anymore.
The high inclination orbit saved the iss project when the american shuttle program came to a crashing halt. In a lower inclination, the progress resupply vehicles would not have the capacity required to keep the ISS supplied.
Reaching ISS could seriously be the next challenge.
It is the next financial bonanza for the first company that can do it, they can bid against the russians to do launches for Nasa, who has demonstrated over the last couple of years, they are incapable of reaching the ISS. Thankfully, it's in a high enough inclination that a progress launched out of russia can carry a significant payload for resupply.
Microsoft gives free pc's to entire school systems when its part of the terms of settlement of a class action law suit. The courts determine a minimum payment level for proceeds of the class suit, and when the actual claims of the class participants dont meet that level, the balance goes to charitable things like buying pc's for schools. This has happened in california twice that I know of, and probably in other states as well.
As for the google folks, well, they've had the ipo proceeds for a month now, which in reality are probably still mostly tied up in investment banker accounts awaiting various releases and transfers. It took Billy 20 years and the aquisition of a wife before he actually started doing any serious philanthropy. Come back in 20 years, see how Google fits into the corporate landscape, or if it even still exists, and then look at what the founders did after they had some time to adjust to the concepts of having hundreds of millions of dollars kicking around.
you are trying to use ipv6 on an ipv4 network. Not gonna work till the whole internet has all the plumbing replaced with ipv6 capable equipment. That's not gonna happen till there is a need. A bunch of folks whining about 'no ipv6 support' is not a need. Show a good solid profitable business case, and the net will switch overnite. Till then, ipv4 seems to be doing the job just fine...
NAT was a workaround to a percieved problem, exhaustion of ipv4 address space. Now that the trend is to only have a couple ipv4 entry points to the typical lan, and have the rest of the lan in private ip space anyways, the problem doesn't exist as folks percieved it would.
IPV6 was a solution to a problem, but, the internet did what the internet was supposed to do, it found an immediate solution, and NAT became the de facto cure for address space exhaustion. In essence, the internet routed around the problem, long before the 'proper' cure became widespread. To most commercial bandwidth providers, IPV6 is more of a problem than a solution, it means expensive upgrades to expensive equipment. Not gonna happen as long as the combination of IPv4 + NAT can do the trick.
I will admit, on a new server, this is a pretty slick trick to stress test the whole system. Just suggest nudie pics available to the /. crowd, sit back, and watch to see if the upstream routers can deal with the loads. It's a far better way to see if your upstream providers have problems than sitting back and waiting till there's real business/money on the line. I've got a new load balanced cluster going live for a client in a couple weeks, probly gonna steal a page from your book here, I've always known the /. test was a good one, never thought to spice the blurb with the hint of nudie pics.
It sure does, you plug it into the asterisk box, so you have a method or routing local calls from the rest of your voip devices....
It's called WebTV.