Those poor, poor rich folks, in the top wealthiest 10%. They pay more than 10% of all taxes, they pay a full 33% -- isn't that outrageous? I'm sorry, there's a big flaw in your reasoning. The top 10% probably take in 50% of all income (or let's suppose at least). It would be FAIR to make them pay 50% of all taxes. If they pay only 33%, they're paying less in proportion to their income than most tax payers, and that's a benefit they, above all people, DON'T need. The richest 10% should pay a LARGER proportion of all taxes than their proportion of national income.
I haven't used the word *dumb* in a posting for a long time, but in this case it applies!
The problem with the taxes is not that the rich are paying their proportional share. They are paying far more than their proportional share! They pay a higher RATE of taxes, not just higher taxes!
And another liberal myth rears its ugly head! No, being rich doesn't allow you to hire accountants who keep you from getting taxed. The only way you avoid being taxed if you have a lot of income is to do exactly what the government wants with your money. That's what those accountant will tell you. Sure... put it in tax free bonds. But the payout on those bonds is much less as a result... so you are still paying the tax... just indirectly to the bond issuer!
The only large tax break I am aware of that is silly is real estate depreciation. The TEFRA act of 1986, with its passive loss deduction, removed that loophole from the rich - and coincidentally was the true cause of the S&L collapse.
It is a myth that the rich avoid paying taxes by using loopholes.
Much as I love David Brin's novels, I find his political analysis to be shallow.
He says he is not advocating class warfare, and then does exactly that. He objects that Bush's tax cut gives back a disproportionate amount of money to the top 1%, but seems to ignore the fact that those people are paying an even more disproportionate amount of taxes. Even Bush's tax plans make the tax system *more progressive* (and thus, in my opinion, more unfair to those who strive to achieve and be rewarded for it).
He decries social engineering, and yet supports a candidate who will use the tax code to do exactly that. Every time the tax code gets more complex ("targetted tax cuts") the government engages in more social engineering, more programming of our choices, and thus reduces our individual freedoms.
He also doesn't seem to realize that since the end of income averaging, the tax code taxes many more "rich" people who are just happen to get a bunch of their income in one lump sum, and thus hit a very high tax rate. For example, if you trade some of your salary for equity, then when you finally cash in on that equity, you will be "rich" as far as the tax code is concerned, even though you may end up with no more money than someone who took the money as salary and payed less taxes than you did. It has happened to me. And it happens to small business owners all the time.
He is willing to unfairly tax people twice in order to satsify his dubious social policy goal of preventing idle rich kids (not exactly a significant problem in the US, and not because of the tax code) and to encourage charitable giving. Folks, it ain't charity if government extortion forces you to do it. Furthermore, some of the greatest charitable foundations in the country were set up before we had those taxes! And, if you do the math, you will see that the tax hits hardest at those who are the children of the not-very-rich. If your parents have $100 million, and the tax takes $55 million, you can still be an *evil* idle millionaire if you want. But if they only have a couple of million, the tax makes a difference between a retirement cushion for you and not having one! David, you are a physicist... DO THE MATH (DTFM). Do you really believe that Bill Gates set up his foundation to avoid taxes? Carnegie? Ford? How much more money would go to charitable foundations if the government wasn't taking it from people and then redistributing it according to whatever buys the most votes?
And then there is the specious attack on W's IQ. OK - W wouldn't be the top guy at a geek convention, but neither would Algore. If you extrapolate their SAT tests to IQ (which, for verbal SATs is a very good extrapolation), there is only a slight difference, and both are almost two standard deviations above average.Furthermore, there is no evidence that high IQ is correlated with presidential success - just look at Nixon and Carter! Also, it is clear that Gore's "high IQ" has not blessed him with any degree of judgement when it comes to science - his environmental conclusions are not based on science or scientific reasoning, but rather radical romanticism. I'd rather take a solid guy who knows how to delegate over a genius who wlil pander, engage in class warfare, exagerrate his own achievements, make most his income from oil and tobacco while pretending to big their biggest enemies, and in general behave like a spoiled, power hungry rich kid.
And let us not forget who "owns" the democratic party... it is the teachers' unions (who bring us a public school system that consumes more money per pupil than almost any country in the world, and delivers far less educational results than every first world country and most second world countries)... it is the tort lawyers who use the billions of dollars that they got from the tobacco companies to attack the very capitalism that David naively thinks he supports... and who one of these days will get around to going after the software industry (after they destroy the pharmaceutical industry, the auto industry, the chemical industry, the firearms industry, etc)... it is the giant companies that prosper from *more* government regulation... and who use things like extreme environmental regulation to prevent small, less well capitalized companies from entering their field.
If you believe that the tax system should be used to control individual decisions... that the money really belongs to the government and they are just letting you use it... that the government should discriminate based on skin color or other artificial characteristics... that the problem with our schools is that we don't give them enough money or federal control... that Al Gore is a farmer... that Al Gore invented the internet... the Al and Tipper were the inspiration for Love Story... that Al Gore discovered the Love Canal problem... that the greatest national security threat is the automobile (form Algore's book)...
Sure... vote for Al.
And to those Libertarians out there...
Do you really want a government that believes IT can make the important decisions for you (taxes, who you can hire, what you can do with your land, etc, etc, etc)?
Okay. Speaking as a parent who has raised a kid (she's now 23)... You can't blame it all on the parents, and you can't blame it all on the culture. The job of parents is made much harder by a nihilistic, libertine anything-goes negative culture. Those who say the problem is parents obviously haven't seen how hard it is to deal with these issues - quality time or not.
When kids get to their teen years (I suspect many on this net are there, by age or emotionally), they pay a lot more attention to those of their own age than their parents. That is their nature. It is part of growing up. And during those times, the influence of popular culture is enormous.
As an extreme example, look at how the popular culture in Nazi Germany led many kids to become SS members. In many cases, these kids were not bad and neither were their parents. But the constant indoctrination from the culture of their time (controlled by Goebbels rather than Hollywood and the Record Companies) was enough to turn many of them into brutal killers.
Parenting counts - no doubt about that. But culture is a powerful influence. And beyond that, possibly in the Columbine case, one encounters genetic or developmental biological issues that occasionally turn someone into a monster no matter what their environment.
Gore thinks that environment is more important than people (it's in his book even if he tones it down on TV).
Bush thinks that one must compromise environmental protection in some cases. I agree with him.
Environmentalism has become the latest cult. It is now an animist religion.
You can tell an environmentalist from a conservationist (someone, like Bush or myself or many others, who wants to preserve some of the environment for the future) by asking them what the purpose of environmental policy is.
The modern environmentalist will not have a ready answer, because to them environmentalism is a religion.
The conservationist will say that one should preserve the environment, as appropriate, for future use by mankind.
Of course George Bush mentioned the internet when mentioning cultural impact, because the internet is now part of our culture.
Get used to it, folks! The internet has bad things on it and bad influences, just like any other part of our mass media culture. Just because a candidate mentions that negative influence does not mean that he is idiotic or clueless or anything else... in fact, quite the opposite.
I tire of the paranoid rantings of internet folks who freak out every time someone says something negative about the net. Guys, that it gets mentioned at all is a sign of its success. If it becomes an integral part of life, then it will become an integral part of both the good and bad sides of life.
I watched that debate. George Bush didn't attack the internet. He attacked negative sides of our culture (which are very real and can be quite dangerous to the already deluded) and happened to mention that people were be able to access it via the net.
Grow up! Not every mention of the net is an cry for censorship. Not everything about the net is good. And the net is no longer the private toy of geeks, privacy advocates and libertarians!
Bush was *not* attacking the internet. Bush was first of all pointing out that it is the culture, not guns, that encourages Columbine-like behavior. There can be no doubt that the Columbine killers were affected by the culture, and accessed that through the internet.
Bush was attacking the Democratic strawman that a lack of gun laws was the cause of Columbine. It is the folks who want to take guns away that are the greatest threat to our freedom... because they want to take away ALL of our rights except the right to politically correct speech, and the right to any sort of sex we want.
Internet folks shouldn't be so paranoid. The Internet is a big phenomenon. It is no longer the plaything of techies.
As far as parenting goes, there is no evidence that these were bad parents. More likely, one or both of those kids were psychopaths by nature, and picked up on the prevailing dark side of the culture as part of their fantasies. OTOH it is clear that the celebrity culture is what drove them to kill so many... they wanted to become famous, and they succeeded. This was a stated goal of their attack.
The sad thing is that workflow management by interactive computer systems has been around for a long time. Simply achieving that result using web technology is not novel and teaches nothing (requirements for a *real* patent). It is one more example of an abusive patent granted by a clueless USPTO.
I am a little surprised that this fungus could live outside of the MIR. The environment in not simply oxygen deficient... it is pressure deficient, which should cause the fungus to evaporate - at least its liquids.After all, even a fungus has to respect partial pressures!
Also, the temperature can be expected to change from extremely cold to extremely hot, unless the MIR is stablized relative to the sun.
Imagine a gadget the size of a cell phone. One side of it is a touch sensitive display. Normally it shows big buttons - the size of cell phone butons, and with the same function. But touch one special button and it turns into a Palm display (with higher resolution if possible).
As far as integrated dialing from the address book, do it the way cell phones do now. Couple it to the palm by having a category for cell phone calls. I have 1000 names and addresses in my palm, and I don't want to have to go through those for a cellular call.
You've got it backwards! The US turned OFF the dithering during the gulf war, because they did not have enough military GPS units, and had to equip military units with civilian units.
GPS, even dithered, is accurate enough for air traffic work other than altitude. GPS, not dithered, is not accurate enough for landings, unless supplemented with differential GPS. Differential GPS works even with the dithered signal.
Bouncing comments:"The Truth is, both of these "technologies" look pretty straight forward. I love how pointie haired ones always want to make obvious programming a tradesecret. On the more interesting side: perhaps patents could serve the purpose of seeing who figured out the obvious first?"
No... patents serve the purpose of seeing who is willing to go through the BS to patent an obvious idea that others may have had for decades. They also serve the purpose of showing how clueless the USPO is - by issuing patents on techniques that have been in use for decades.
If not stopped, software and "business idea" patents are going to kill the entreprenurial goose that has laid the golden eggs for the US economy!
Patents were considered so important to innovation that they are provided for in the US Constitution, a pretty short document. But patents issued by an incompetent bureaucracy to those who are copying ideas in use for ages, or to those who patent things that are trivially obvious, violent the intent of the constitution.
There has been a gold rush for patent seekers since the US Supreme court ruled that well known business methods, implemented in software, can be patented. People have been patenting every idea that has been in use for ages, at the expense of the rest of us who are not clued in to this or don't have the time, money or sociopathy to join in this greedfest. The odds are that if you are doing any programming for any sort of business, you are in violation of patents of all sorts.
Cost is an issue, but should not be prohibitive for most. After all, since you fly out of Midway you already have a transponder and a radio and probably a bunch of other electronics. This system simply requires a GPS, a radio, and a display (and a computer, but embedded computers are cheap). Also, one could have some airspace where the system is not required, just like you have (or had, it's been a while since I was PIC) airspace with no required transponders.
As far as distracting you from looking outside the cockpit... would it really be more distracting than all the fussing around you have to do today if you are flying IFR and dealing with ATC?
Going to an autonomous system does not mean going to a lawless one.There would still need to be safety regulations and the need for enforcement.
Today, however, you have the FAA in the role of both service provider to powerful monied interests (the airlines), and at the same time regulator of that service provision. They are already in a conflict of interest, and they already feel the pressures of the airlines, and pass that on to their controllers.
Even if you keep a ground based control system (and there is still need for it in high traffic areas IMHO), there is no reason to keep it under the control of the same agency that does the regulation.
A PAR approach is certainly an exception, but it is largly irrelevant. You do not normally use PAR to calibrate your altimeter, and it does you no good anywhere except right on the approach.
The replacement for ELT's, called EPIRBs, operate on a higher frequency (406 vs 121.5/243) MHz with higher accuracy. They can be located much more accurately, so they don't really need the GPS (although some of them have it).
I have done many ELT hunts for the Civil Air Patrol. The problem with them is not the lack of GPS, but the lack of quality. According to NASA statistics, 97% of ELT activations are false alarms, and in 50% of real crashes, the ELT's fail to operate.
This great (%$%$%$@@) system was brought to you by the FAA - the same people who operate the air traffic control system that the GPS system could replace!
GPS is not only difficult to spoof, but is hard to block. It is a spread-spectrum technology, and that means blocking it either requires inordinately high power, or transmitting a correlated signal. The latter is just as difficult as transmitting a spoofing (intentionally erroneous) signal.
Regular GPS, even now that the selective availability has been turned off, is far less accurate in altitude than in lat/long - it is a simple matter of geometry. My consumer GPS is rarely more than 15 feet off in location now that SA is off, but altitude varies by a lot more than 100 feet. So DGPS (which was not, contrary to what one poster seems to imagine, invented by some Swedish guy who is being locked out of US markets) is still important if you care about your altitude - i.e. when anywhere other than en-route.
For those who keep mentioning altimeters, they should realize that altimeters depend on ground supplied correction factors ("altimeter settings") for their accuracy, and aren't all that accurate anyway. An altimeter is just a barometer with a different readout - which should tell you that weather changes cause apparent altitude changes. This has been responsible for many crashes over the years. Here in Arizona, where ground reporting stations are far apart and tall mountains are frequent, knowing altitude more accurately would save lives among those who, through follishness or occasional bad luck, tempt the aviation gods in bad weather or visiblity and fly too low.
One thing most of those criticizing the GPS based system miss is that the current system greatly increases aircraft density, which itself leads to collisions. The Air Traffic System has fixed locations in the sky which aircraft must go to as part of standar approaches and departures. Furthermore there are fixed, narrow corridors. Thus many aircraft (especially small aircraft) are focussed into small parts of the airspace, and they do collide there!
With an autonomous system, without human controllers, such fixed points and routes would be unnecessary. Aircraft could go point-to-point, reducing density and collision probabilities. Furthermore it would increase traffic capabilities.
As a former pilot who had to spend way too much cockpit time dealing with air traffic control regulations and navigation, rather than watching for traffic and flying to a destination, I think that the current system sucks!
Air traffic control radar relies primarily on transponders, which are points of failure already mounted on the aircraft. It is common for controllers to ignore (turn down) the "skin paint" (radar return) from aircraft. Thus the failure mode you describe is already present in the existing system.
Put another way... the current system is not primarily a radar system, but rather is a system relying on communications between a central system (the transponder interrogator mounted on the radar antenna) and each aircraft.
Today, you can trivially override or jam the broadcasts from the air traffic controllers. This has happened and is considered a serious threat.
So setting up your own transmitter is just repeating an existing threat. The same techniques that are used to catch the folks jamming ATC will catch you.
Furthermore, since aircraft are most interested in signals from other aircraft close to them (which are the ones that represent a collision threat), your jamming would only be significant to aircraft very close to you.
So, overall, I think that the GPS autoreporting system can be significantly more jam-resistant than the current ATC system.
You overestimate the difficulty. You do not need a powerful radio or big antennae, because any aircraft that you care about will be trivially reachable with low power (due to line-of-sight). The amount of computing power is, by today's standards, also small. Since you mostly care about signals from aircraft close to you, radio interference is likewise not a big problem, especially with modern (but cheap) techniques.
If you look at the incredible sophistication of modern cellular phones, and the low costs, you realize that powerful, sophisticated and flexible radio systems can be made at very low cost.
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Those poor, poor rich folks, in the top wealthiest 10%. They pay more than 10% of all taxes, they pay a full 33% -- isn't that outrageous? I'm sorry, there's a big flaw in your reasoning. The top 10% probably take in 50% of all income (or let's suppose at least). It would be FAIR to make them pay 50% of all taxes. If they pay only 33%, they're paying less in proportion to their income than most tax payers, and that's a benefit they, above all people, DON'T need. The richest 10% should pay a LARGER proportion of all taxes than their proportion of national income.
I haven't used the word *dumb* in a posting for a long time, but in this case it applies!
The problem with the taxes is not that the rich are paying their proportional share. They are paying far more than their proportional share! They pay a higher RATE of taxes, not just higher taxes!
And another liberal myth rears its ugly head! No, being rich doesn't allow you to hire accountants who keep you from getting taxed. The only way you avoid being taxed if you have a lot of income is to do exactly what the government wants with your money. That's what those accountant will tell you. Sure... put it in tax free bonds. But the payout on those bonds is much less as a result... so you are still paying the tax... just indirectly to the bond issuer!
The only large tax break I am aware of that is silly is real estate depreciation. The TEFRA act of 1986, with its passive loss deduction, removed that loophole from the rich - and coincidentally was the true cause of the S&L collapse.
It is a myth that the rich avoid paying taxes by using loopholes.
Much as I love David Brin's novels, I find his political analysis to be shallow.
... the Al and Tipper were the inspiration for Love Story... that Al Gore discovered the Love Canal problem... that the greatest national security threat is the automobile (form Algore's book)...
He says he is not advocating class warfare, and then does exactly that. He objects that Bush's tax cut gives back a disproportionate amount of money to the top 1%, but seems to ignore the fact that those people are paying an even more disproportionate amount of taxes. Even Bush's tax plans make the tax system *more progressive* (and thus, in my opinion, more unfair to those who strive to achieve and be rewarded for it).
He decries social engineering, and yet supports a candidate who will use the tax code to do exactly that. Every time the tax code gets more complex ("targetted tax cuts") the government engages in more social engineering, more programming of our choices, and thus reduces our individual freedoms.
He also doesn't seem to realize that since the end of income averaging, the tax code taxes many more "rich" people who are just happen to get a bunch of their income in one lump sum, and thus hit a very high tax rate. For example, if you trade some of your salary for equity, then when you finally cash in on that equity, you will be "rich" as far as the tax code is concerned, even though you may end up with no more money than someone who took the money as salary and payed less taxes than you did. It has happened to me. And it happens to small business owners all the time.
He is willing to unfairly tax people twice in order to satsify his dubious social policy goal of preventing idle rich kids (not exactly a significant problem in the US, and not because of the tax code) and to encourage charitable giving. Folks, it ain't charity if government extortion forces you to do it. Furthermore, some of the greatest charitable foundations in the country were set up before we had those taxes! And, if you do the math, you will see that the tax hits hardest at those who are the children of the not-very-rich. If your parents have $100 million, and the tax takes $55 million, you can still be an *evil* idle millionaire if you want. But if they only have a couple of million, the tax makes a difference between a retirement cushion for you and not having one! David, you are a physicist... DO THE MATH (DTFM). Do you really believe that Bill Gates set up his foundation to avoid taxes? Carnegie? Ford? How much more money would go to charitable foundations if the government wasn't taking it from people and then redistributing it according to whatever buys the most votes?
And then there is the specious attack on W's IQ. OK - W wouldn't be the top guy at a geek convention, but neither would Algore. If you extrapolate their SAT tests to IQ (which, for verbal SATs is a very good extrapolation), there is only a slight difference, and both are almost two standard deviations above average.Furthermore, there is no evidence that high IQ is correlated with presidential success - just look at Nixon and Carter! Also, it is clear that Gore's "high IQ" has not blessed him with any degree of judgement when it comes to science - his environmental conclusions are not based on science or scientific reasoning, but rather radical romanticism. I'd rather take a solid guy who knows how to delegate over a genius who wlil pander, engage in class warfare, exagerrate his own achievements, make most his income from oil and tobacco while pretending to big their biggest enemies, and in general behave like a spoiled, power hungry rich kid.
And let us not forget who "owns" the democratic party... it is the teachers' unions (who bring us a public school system that consumes more money per pupil than almost any country in the world, and delivers far less educational results than every first world country and most second world countries)... it is the tort lawyers who use the billions of dollars that they got from the tobacco companies to attack the very capitalism that David naively thinks he supports... and who one of these days will get around to going after the software industry (after they destroy the pharmaceutical industry, the auto industry, the chemical industry, the firearms industry, etc)... it is the giant companies that prosper from *more* government regulation... and who use things like extreme environmental regulation to prevent small, less well capitalized companies from entering their field.
If you believe that the tax system should be used to control individual decisions... that the money really belongs to the government and they are just letting you use it... that the government should discriminate based on skin color or other artificial characteristics... that the problem with our schools is that we don't give them enough money or federal control... that Al Gore is a farmer... that Al Gore invented the internet
Sure... vote for Al.
And to those Libertarians out there...
Do you really want a government that believes IT can make the important decisions for you (taxes, who you can hire, what you can do with your land, etc, etc, etc)?
Okay. Speaking as a parent who has raised a kid (she's now 23)... You can't blame it all on the parents, and you can't blame it all on the culture. The job of parents is made much harder by a nihilistic, libertine anything-goes negative culture. Those who say the problem is parents obviously haven't seen how hard it is to deal with these issues - quality time or not.
When kids get to their teen years (I suspect many on this net are there, by age or emotionally), they pay a lot more attention to those of their own age than their parents. That is their nature. It is part of growing up. And during those times, the influence of popular culture is enormous.
As an extreme example, look at how the popular culture in Nazi Germany led many kids to become SS members. In many cases, these kids were not bad and neither were their parents. But the constant indoctrination from the culture of their time (controlled by Goebbels rather than Hollywood and the Record Companies) was enough to turn many of them into brutal killers.
Parenting counts - no doubt about that. But culture is a powerful influence. And beyond that, possibly in the Columbine case, one encounters genetic or developmental biological issues that occasionally turn someone into a monster no matter what their environment.
Oversimplified.
Gore thinks that environment is more important than people (it's in his book even if he tones it down on TV).
Bush thinks that one must compromise environmental protection in some cases. I agree with him.
Environmentalism has become the latest cult. It is now an animist religion.
You can tell an environmentalist from a conservationist (someone, like Bush or myself or many others, who wants to preserve some of the environment for the future) by asking them what the purpose of environmental policy is.
The modern environmentalist will not have a ready answer, because to them environmentalism is a religion.
The conservationist will say that one should preserve the environment, as appropriate, for future use by mankind.
Of course George Bush mentioned the internet when mentioning cultural impact, because the internet is now part of our culture.
Get used to it, folks! The internet has bad things on it and bad influences, just like any other part of our mass media culture. Just because a candidate mentions that negative influence does not mean that he is idiotic or clueless or anything else... in fact, quite the opposite.
I tire of the paranoid rantings of internet folks who freak out every time someone says something negative about the net. Guys, that it gets mentioned at all is a sign of its success. If it becomes an integral part of life, then it will become an integral part of both the good and bad sides of life.
I watched that debate. George Bush didn't attack the internet. He attacked negative sides of our culture (which are very real and can be quite dangerous to the already deluded) and happened to mention that people were be able to access it via the net.
Grow up! Not every mention of the net is an cry for censorship. Not everything about the net is good. And the net is no longer the private toy of geeks, privacy advocates and libertarians!
Bush was *not* attacking the internet. Bush was first of all pointing out that it is the culture, not guns, that encourages Columbine-like behavior. There can be no doubt that the Columbine killers were affected by the culture, and accessed that through the internet.
Bush was attacking the Democratic strawman that a lack of gun laws was the cause of Columbine. It is the folks who want to take guns away that are the greatest threat to our freedom... because they want to take away ALL of our rights except the right to politically correct speech, and the right to any sort of sex we want.
Internet folks shouldn't be so paranoid. The Internet is a big phenomenon. It is no longer the plaything of techies.
As far as parenting goes, there is no evidence that these were bad parents. More likely, one or both of those kids were psychopaths by nature, and picked up on the prevailing dark side of the culture as part of their fantasies. OTOH it is clear that the celebrity culture is what drove them to kill so many... they wanted to become famous, and they succeeded. This was a stated goal of their attack.
The EDN article referenced refers to switching a light signal at a frequency of 200THZ, not a bandwidth of 200THZ. BIG DIFFERENCE>
The sad thing is that workflow management by interactive computer systems has been around for a long time. Simply achieving that result using web technology is not novel and teaches nothing (requirements for a *real* patent). It is one more example of an abusive patent granted by a clueless USPTO.
I am a little surprised that this fungus could live outside of the MIR. The environment in not simply oxygen deficient... it is pressure deficient, which should cause the fungus to evaporate - at least its liquids.After all, even a fungus has to respect partial pressures!
Also, the temperature can be expected to change from extremely cold to extremely hot, unless the MIR is stablized relative to the sun.
Imagine a gadget the size of a cell phone. One side of it is a touch sensitive display. Normally it shows big buttons - the size of cell phone butons, and with the same function. But touch one special button and it turns into a Palm display (with higher resolution if possible).
As far as integrated dialing from the address book, do it the way cell phones do now. Couple it to the palm by having a category for cell phone calls. I have 1000 names and addresses in my palm, and I don't want to have to go through those for a cellular call.
You've got it backwards! The US turned OFF the dithering during the gulf war, because they did not have enough military GPS units, and had to equip military units with civilian units.
GPS, even dithered, is accurate enough for air traffic work other than altitude. GPS, not dithered, is not accurate enough for landings, unless supplemented with differential GPS. Differential GPS works even with the dithered signal.
Translation: NOT AN ISSUE.
Bouncing comments:"The Truth is, both of these "technologies" look pretty straight forward. I love how pointie haired ones always want to make obvious programming a tradesecret. On the more interesting side: perhaps patents could serve the purpose of seeing who figured out the obvious first?"
No... patents serve the purpose of seeing who is willing to go through the BS to patent an obvious idea that others may have had for decades. They also serve the purpose of showing how clueless the USPO is - by issuing patents on techniques that have been in use for decades.
If not stopped, software and "business idea" patents are going to kill the entreprenurial goose that has laid the golden eggs for the US economy!
Patents were considered so important to innovation that they are provided for in the US Constitution, a pretty short document. But patents issued by an incompetent bureaucracy to those who are copying ideas in use for ages, or to those who patent things that are trivially obvious, violent the intent of the constitution.
There has been a gold rush for patent seekers since the US Supreme court ruled that well known business methods, implemented in software, can be patented. People have been patenting every idea that has been in use for ages, at the expense of the rest of us who are not clued in to this or don't have the time, money or sociopathy to join in this greedfest. The odds are that if you are doing any programming for any sort of business, you are in violation of patents of all sorts.
IT IS RIDICULOUS!
Cost is an issue, but should not be prohibitive for most. After all, since you fly out of Midway you already have a transponder and a radio and probably a bunch of other electronics. This system simply requires a GPS, a radio, and a display (and a computer, but embedded computers are cheap). Also, one could have some airspace where the system is not required, just like you have (or had, it's been a while since I was PIC) airspace with no required transponders.
As far as distracting you from looking outside the cockpit... would it really be more distracting than all the fussing around you have to do today if you are flying IFR and dealing with ATC?
Going to an autonomous system does not mean going to a lawless one.There would still need to be safety regulations and the need for enforcement.
Today, however, you have the FAA in the role of both service provider to powerful monied interests (the airlines), and at the same time regulator of that service provision. They are already in a conflict of interest, and they already feel the pressures of the airlines, and pass that on to their controllers.
Even if you keep a ground based control system (and there is still need for it in high traffic areas IMHO), there is no reason to keep it under the control of the same agency that does the regulation.
I stand by my comment in general.
A PAR approach is certainly an exception, but it is largly irrelevant. You do not normally use PAR to calibrate your altimeter, and it does you no good anywhere except right on the approach.
ATC does not have altitude determining (height-finding) radars. It relies solely on the on-board altimeters of the aircraft.
The replacement for ELT's, called EPIRBs, operate on a higher frequency (406 vs 121.5/243) MHz with higher accuracy. They can be located much more accurately, so they don't really need the GPS (although some of them have it).
I have done many ELT hunts for the Civil Air Patrol. The problem with them is not the lack of GPS, but the lack of quality. According to NASA statistics, 97% of ELT activations are false alarms, and in 50% of real crashes, the ELT's fail to operate.
This great (%$%$%$@@) system was brought to you by the FAA - the same people who operate the air traffic control system that the GPS system could replace!
GPS is not only difficult to spoof, but is hard to block. It is a spread-spectrum technology, and that means blocking it either requires inordinately high power, or transmitting a correlated signal. The latter is just as difficult as transmitting a spoofing (intentionally erroneous) signal.
Regular GPS, even now that the selective availability has been turned off, is far less accurate in altitude than in lat/long - it is a simple matter of geometry. My consumer GPS is rarely more than 15 feet off in location now that SA is off, but altitude varies by a lot more than 100 feet. So DGPS (which was not, contrary to what one poster seems to imagine, invented by some Swedish guy who is being locked out of US markets) is still important if you care about your altitude - i.e. when anywhere other than en-route.
For those who keep mentioning altimeters, they should realize that altimeters depend on ground supplied correction factors ("altimeter settings") for their accuracy, and aren't all that accurate anyway. An altimeter is just a barometer with a different readout - which should tell you that weather changes cause apparent altitude changes. This has been responsible for many crashes over the years. Here in Arizona, where ground reporting stations are far apart and tall mountains are frequent, knowing altitude more accurately would save lives among those who, through follishness or occasional bad luck, tempt the aviation gods in bad weather or visiblity and fly too low.
One thing most of those criticizing the GPS based system miss is that the current system greatly increases aircraft density, which itself leads to collisions. The Air Traffic System has fixed locations in the sky which aircraft must go to as part of standar approaches and departures. Furthermore there are fixed, narrow corridors. Thus many aircraft (especially small aircraft) are focussed into small parts of the airspace, and they do collide there!
With an autonomous system, without human controllers, such fixed points and routes would be unnecessary. Aircraft could go point-to-point, reducing density and collision probabilities. Furthermore it would increase traffic capabilities.
As a former pilot who had to spend way too much cockpit time dealing with air traffic control regulations and navigation, rather than watching for traffic and flying to a destination, I think that the current system sucks!
Air traffic control radar relies primarily on transponders, which are points of failure already mounted on the aircraft. It is common for controllers to ignore (turn down) the "skin paint" (radar return) from aircraft. Thus the failure mode you describe is already present in the existing system.
Put another way... the current system is not primarily a radar system, but rather is a system relying on communications between a central system (the transponder interrogator mounted on the radar antenna) and each aircraft.
Today, you can trivially override or jam the broadcasts from the air traffic controllers. This has happened and is considered a serious threat.
So setting up your own transmitter is just repeating an existing threat. The same techniques that are used to catch the folks jamming ATC will catch you.
Furthermore, since aircraft are most interested in signals from other aircraft close to them (which are the ones that represent a collision threat), your jamming would only be significant to aircraft very close to you.
So, overall, I think that the GPS autoreporting system can be significantly more jam-resistant than the current ATC system.
You overestimate the difficulty. You do not need a powerful radio or big antennae, because any aircraft that you care about will be trivially reachable with low power (due to line-of-sight). The amount of computing power is, by today's standards, also small. Since you mostly care about signals from aircraft close to you, radio interference is likewise not a big problem, especially with modern (but cheap) techniques.
If you look at the incredible sophistication of modern cellular phones, and the low costs, you realize that powerful, sophisticated and flexible radio systems can be made at very low cost.
err... Russia shot down Gary Powers, not Cuba!